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RECOGNITION 



THE CEEATOE 



IE" DAILY LIFE. 



BY THE COMPILER OF " IXSTAURATIO." 



"Ps p^ple hnbt forgotten xtxt bans foitbout tromfor." 



HARTFORD: A 
PRESS OF CASE, LOCKWOOD & BRALXARD. 
1873. 



714- 



Entered according to Act of* Congress, in the year 1873, by 

CASE, LOCKWOOD & BRAINARD, 
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 



THE KEW TEAR 



1. Now they began on the first day of the first 
month to sanctify. 

' It is a merciful provision that the Stream of 
Time does not run in one continuous flow, but it is 
taken up and separated into portions which are for 
' signs and for seasons, and for days and years.' 
These changes and vicissitudes present us success- 
ively with renewed occasions and encouragements to 
amend our lives, and to set out as it were on a new 



course/ 



1 Pure and bright it lies before us, 

Like the snowy moor untrod • — 
The future hides in it And solemn before us 

Gladness and sorrow ; Veiled the dark Portal, 

We press still thorow ; Goal of all mortal ; — 
Nought that abides in it Stars silent rest o'er us — 
Daunting us — Onward ! Graves under us silent. 

— Goethe. 

1 We see the end — but not the path. 
O'er mountain tops with fainting hearts and weary, 

We yet must climb ; 
Then in the valleys, desolate and dreary, 

Abide our time.' 

(3) 



4 THE INFINITE PERSONAL REASON. 

* The undeveloped flower-cup 
Will persevere, 
And rear its scented chalice up, 
Enbahning all its heart cells through 
With sweetness. — Another year/ 

For I the Lord thy God will hold thy right hand, 
saying unto thee, Fear not, I will help thee. — And 
she called the name of the Lord that spake unto her 9 
Thou Grod seest me. 

2. To stretch toward the Infinite is the first effort. 
The second, is to connect the Infinite with our per- 
sonal sphere, our movements, interests, and destinies. 
The mind of man, gazing up to the Infinite Nature 
with mingled reverence and trust, opens and utters 
itself to Omniscience. His awful presence is un- 
utterably near to us. The open Infinite Eye gazes 
upon us every moment. When this faith is once 
reached, life becomes invested with wondrous sanc- 
tity. — Young. - 

All complete knowledge involves the taking of 
manifold elements, separating and sorting them, and 
finally comprehending them in Unity. So the indi- 
vidual finite reason, if at all, must know the univer- 
sal reason ; and the finite may so know the universal 
as to see in it that the universal must be personal. — 
Hickok. 

3o Lf I take the wings of the morning and dwell 
in the uttermost parts of the sea : even there shall thy 
hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me. 



OMNIPRESENCE, & 

If we consider him in his omnipresence ; his being 
passes through, actuates, and supports the whole 
frame of nature. His creation and every part of it 
is full of him. There is nothing he has made, that 
is either so distant, so little, or so inconsiderable, 
which he ■ does not essentially inhabit. His sub- 
stance is within the substance of every being, whether 
material or immaterial, and as intimately present to 
it, as that being is to itself. It would be an imper- 
fection in him, were he able to remove out of one 
place into another, or to withdraw himself from any- 
thing he has created, or from any part of that space 
which is so diffused and spread abroad to infinity. 
In short, to speak ol him in the language of an old 
philosopher : — He is a being whose centre is every- 
where, and his circumference nowhere. — Spectator. 

We must believe him great without quantity, om- 
nipresent without place, everlasting without time, and 
containing all things without extent ; and when our 
thoughts are come to the highest, let us stop, wonder, 
and adore ! — Hall. 

For thus saith the high and lofty One that inhabit- 
eth eternity, whose name is Holy, I dwell in the high 
a) id holy place, with him also that is of a contrite and 
humble spirit. 

* I have felt 
A presence that disturbs ine with the joy 
Of elevated thoughts ; a sense sublime, 
Of something far more deeply interfused — 
Well pleased to recognize 



6 OMNIPRESENCE. 

In nature and the language of the sense, 
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, 
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul 
Of all my moral being. — Wordsworth. 

I meditate on thee in the night watches. 

'In the still silence of the voiceless night, 
When, chased by airy dreams, the slumbers flee, 
Whom in the darkness doth my spirit seek, 
O God, but thee ? 

' And if there be a weight upon my breast, 
Some vague impression of the day foregone, 
Scarce knowing what it is, I fly to thee 
And lay it down. 

' Or if it be the heaviness that comes 
In token of anticipated ill, 
My bosom takes no heed of what it is, 
Since 'tis thy will. 

' More tranquil than the stillness of the night, 
More peaceful than the silence of that hour, 
More blest than anything, my spirit lies 
Beneath thy power.' 

4. At a certain time in the course of my inward 
personal history, I found myself in a state of inward 
desolation. God seemed to be hidden from my view ; 
Christ as a distinct object of conception was with- 
drawn. I found nothing .of that familiar and de- 
lightful access to the great Source of life, whether 
denominated God or Christ, to which I had been ac- 
customed. The beautiful ministry of angelic and 
spiritual experiences had departed. And, in addi- 



THE ETERNAL NOW. 7 

tion to this, there was a weakening and disruption of 
the ties which bound me to many of my earthly 
friends. Both inwardly and outwardly was one of 
vacuity and deprivation which apparently wanted 
nothing to its completeness. It reminded me of 
what I had once known in the deserts of Sinai, where 
standing on the tops of the highest mountains, I be- 
held around me nothing but the rugged cliffs. 

Finding myself in this arid and painful condition 
of things, which, perhaps for the sake of convenience 
may be denominated in the language of the old 
mystics, the ' spiritual wilderness,' I remained for a 
time in a sort of amazement, unable to understand 
its nature, or its meaning. At last aroused from the 
inactivity and confusion of spirit which naturally 
attended it, I ventured in my supplications to ask the 
Lord what was the cause of these unlooked-for ex- 
periences, and what instruction lie wished me to de- 
rive from them ? For I knew, though he was hidden 
in great and unprecedented mystery, He must be 
somewhere, where He could listen to the sound of 
my voice. For a time no responsive utterance came, 
neither to the outward ear where I did not look for 
it ; nor to the interior of the soul where I had often 
heard it in suggestions and intimations which left no 
doubt of the divinity of their origin. After such a 
time as seemed necessary to impress me fully with 
the fact of this great desolation, and also train my 
heart to the unwavering acceptance of it as a condi- 



8 THE ETERNAL NOW. 

tion of things which had its significancy and its re- 
sults, and to dwell quietly amid its clouds and dark- 
ness, I received from time to time, and through 
those interior sources which the Holy Spirit knows 
how to open and employ, such intimations and teach- 
ings as became afterwards of great value. With a 
heart devoted to God no longer seek him in the 
heavens above, or the earth beneath, nor in any 
locality which will have the effect to limit his exist- 
ence, but r.ecognize Him as the great fact of the uni- 
verse, separate from no place or part, but revealed 
in all places, and in all things and events, moment 
by moment. . . It is moreover, one of those things 
which in any true philosophy of the universe will be 
found to lie at the foundation of the greatest problem 
of what constitutes the highest amount of human 
happiness. Meeting God in the present moment we 
shall meet Him always the same but always new : 
always unchanged in his essence, but changing al- 
ways in his incidents. The divine moment, lifting 
as it emerges into being, the veil that rests upon 
forms and places, and actions and events, opens that 
little eyelid of eternity and reveals God ; not in a 
perpetual identity of manifestation which would tire 
our perception and annul our growth, but in all possi- 
ble varieties. He stands before us sometimes in the 
storm, and sometimes in the sunshine ; sometimes 
in the waste howling wilderness, and sometimes in 
the field of flowers ; in the palace and the prison, in 



RELIANCE. 9 

friendship and enmity, in joy and. sorrow. And 
thus He is always revealing, step by step, in harmony 
with the nature and extent of our own capacity the 
infinitudes of existence ; and always affording new 
elements of knowledge, new tests of strength, and 
new foundations and appliances of growth and happi- 
ness. Those who live in the divine moment are re- 
lieved in a great degree from the perplexities of 
conjectures and calculations, and cannot be said in 
the usual sense of the terms to have any plans of 
action. Being in harmony with the facts of the 
present moment, it is the law of their condition, 
that they shall do the work which it is given them 
to do, — so that it can justly be said, that the mind 
of the Infinite is substituted for his own, and that 
God plans for him. And hence it is, that the one 
great sign of the practical recognition of the divine 
moment is constant calmness and peace of mind. 
Events and tilings come with the moment, but God 
with them too, written all over with the divinity of 
wisdom and the glory of the promises. — Upham. 

5. The person who has a firm trust in the Su- 
preme Being is powerful in his power, wise by his 
wisdom, happy by his happiness. He reaps the 
benefit of every divine attribute, and loses his own 
insufficiency in the fullness of infinite perfection. 
To make our lives more easy to us, we are com- 
manded to put our trust in him, who is thus able to 
relieve and succor us ; the divine goodness having 



(10 PROGRESSION. 

made such a reliance a duty, notwithstanding we 
should have been miserable had it been forbidden 
us. — Addison. - 

Jonah cried « They that observe lying vanities for- 
sake their own mercy. 

I ivill that men pray everywhere, lifting up holy 
hands without wrath or doubting. 

"Why wilt thou now give place to fear? 

How cans't thou want if he provide ? 

Or lose thy way with such a guide ? 
Slowly, alas ! the mind receives 
The comfort that our Maker gives. 

6 When trial comes, all the consolation that abounds 
with it, is the result of a practiced faith.' 

6. In two several ways I am wont to visit mine 
elect, namely with temptation and consolation. And 
I daily read two lessons to them ; one in reproving 
their vices ; another in exhorting them to the in- 
crease of their virtues. — Kempis. 

Not in one golden year 
Shall thy soul ripen to its glorious prime, 
And the rich fruitage mark the harvest time : 

But slowly, day by day, 
In the full sunshine and the midnight gloom, 
Shall grow the fruit that crowns its wondrous bloom. 

— Emily Miller. 

The blade — the ear — the full corn in the ear. 
Nature rightly understood is a slow worker. Not 
suddenly, not by a single stroke does she accomplish 



PROGRESSION. II, 

her changes, little by little is her rule, and patiently? 
watchfully she awaits the result. — l. a. o. 

For so the Lord said unto me, I will take my rest) 
and I will consider in my dwelling place , like a clear 
heat upon herbs, like a cloud of dew in the heat_qf 
harvest. 

It intimates that the great God has a perfect un- 
disturbed enjoyment of himself in the midst of all 
the tosses and changes of this world ; sits even upon 
the floods undisturbed. The Eternal Mind is always 
easy. He will consider over it what is best to be 
done, and will be sure to do all for the best. — Henry. 

' The Great Soul that sits on the throne of the uni- 
verse is not, never was, and never will be in a hurry. 
In the realm of nature everything has been wrought 
out in the august consciousness of infinite leisure. 
There is no well-doing, no godlike doing, that is not 
patient doing. There is no great achievement that 
is not the result of patient working and waiting. 
There is no royal road to anything. One thing at a 
time, all things in succession. That which grows 
fast withers as rapidly. That which grows slowly, 
slowly endures. Think how patiently he bears with 
ycur impatience. Listen ! there comes no outcry 
from the heavens to still all this wild unrest, but 
gently, patiently, the ministry of nature and Provi- 
dence proceeds from day to day.' 

This mixed divine and human weaving we call 
Life: — wherein the fabric seems so often faulty, 



12 PRAYER. 

where much seems lost, left out, or wrongly joined, 
where correspondence is delayed, and full-matched 
beauty missed ; where colors are confused, where the 
pattern being vast may never quite unroll to earthly 
vision ; where Patience keeps her foot upon the 
treadle and Faith must stand with fervent eyes be- 
side the springing shuttle. — Mrs. Whitney. 

Be not sudden, take God's work together, and do 
not judge of it by parcels or pieces. It is indeed all 
wisdom and righteousness ; but we shall best discern 
the beauty of it, when we look on it in the frame, 
and when it shall be fully completed and finished, 
and our eyes enlightened to take a fuller and com- 
pleter view of it than we can have here. — Leighton. 

In the woefui waste of famine, 

And the scourge of pestilence ; 
In all woes and wrongs around us, 

•In all strife of man with man ; 
In all discords that confound us, 

Runs his great harmonious plan. — Burleigh. 

7. What profit shall we have if we pray unto 
BTim? 

* Prayer makes the darkened cloud withdraw, 

Brings every blessing from above. 

Be straining prayer — we cease to fight/ 

6 Telegraphic communication with heaven closed.' 
All our hopes lie in this higher sphere of thought 



PRAYER. 13 

and emotion. To this region, the only key is prayer. 
— Phelps. 

Speak Lord, for thy servant heareth. In thy faith- 
fulness answer me and in thy righteousness. 

Make me sensible of real answers to actual re- 
quests, as evidences of an interchange between my- 
self on earth and my Saviour in heaven. — Chalmers. 

' A goodly man, the master of an American ship, 
during one of his voyages, found his ship surrounded 
by fog for days, and became very anxious respecting 
her safety. He went down to the cabin and prayed. 
The thought struck him, if he had with confidence 
committed his soul to God, he might certainly com- 
mit his ship to him ; and so accordingly he gave all 
into the hands of God. and felt at perfect peace ; but 
still he prayed that if he would be pleased to give a 
cloudless sky at twelve o'clock, he should like to take 
an observation, to ascertain their real position, and 
whether they were on the right course. He came on 
deck with the quadrant under his coat. As it was 
thick and drizzling, the men looked at him with 
amazement. He went down again to his cabin, 
prayed and came up. There still seemed no hope. 
Again he went down and prayed, and again he ap- 
peared on deck with his quadrant in his hand. It 
was now ten minutes to twelve o'clock, and still there 
was no appearance of a change ; but he stood on 
deck waiting on the Lord, when, in a few minutes, 
the mist seemed folded up and rolled away by an 



14 PRAYER. 

omnipotent and invisible hand ; the sun shone clearly 
from the blue vault of heaven, and there stood the 
man of prayer, with the quadrant in his hand ; but 
so awe-struck did he feel, and so • dreadful ' was that 
place, that he could scarcely take advantage of the 
answer of his prayer. He however succeeded, 
though with trembling hands, and found to his com. 
fort that all was well. But no sooner had he finished 
taking his observation than the mist rolled back over 
the heavens.' 

I have sometimes tried to conceive a panorama of 
the history of one prayer. I have endeavored to 
follow it from its inception in a human mind through 
its utterance by human lips, and in its flight up to 
the ear of Him who is its Hearer because He has 
been also its Inspirer, and on its journey around to 
the unnumbered points in the organism of His 
decrees which this feeble human voice reaches, and 
from which it entices a responsive vibration, because 
this is also a decree of as venerable antiquity as 
theirs : and in its return from those altitudes with 
its golden train of blessings to which eternal coun- 
sels have paid tribute at His bidding. I have 
endeavored to form some conception thus of the 
methods by which this omnipotence of poor human 
speech gains its end without a shock to the system 
ot the universe, with not so much as a whit of 
change to a course of a leaf falling in the air. A 
holy prayer is the spirit of God speaking through 



PRAYER. 15 

the infirmities oi the human soul ; God's breath in 
man returning to his birth. We scarcely utter 
hyperbole in saying, that prayer is the Divine Mind 
communing with itself through finite wants, through 
the woes ot helplessness, through the clinging 
instincts oi weakness. On this side the judgment, 
no other conception of the presence of God is so 
profound as that which is realized in our souls every 
time we offer a genuine prayer. God is not only 
with us but within us. — Phelps. 

Moses wist not that the shin of his face shone while 
he talked with them. 

' Much communion with God will communicate a 
glory to his character which the good man himself 
-will be the last to discover. The man who has 
walked in the garden ot the Lord can not keep the 
secret. His very raiment exhales spice and odor ! ' 

When one that holds communion -with the skies, 
Has filled his urn where those pure waters rise, 
And once more mingles with us meaner things, 
'Tis e'en as if an angel shook his wings. 
Immortal fragrance fills the circuit wide, 
That tells us when his treasures are supplied. 

— COWPER. 
8. I am the Almighty God, icalk before me, and 
be thou perfect. 

Delight thyself also in the Lord, and he shall give 
thee the desires of'thine heart. 

God's providences depend upon men's inter preta- 



16 THE PROMISES. 

tions. When what a man wants is put within his 
reach he always thinks it is a providence. That 
part of you that hears God speaking determines 
what it is that He says. The only time that it is 
safe to give a man the desires of his heart is when 
his heart is fixed on God. It is conceded by all 
that if a man seeks his own highest culture and 
makes manhood the real aim of his being, it is true 
that by seeking God and His righteousness first, he 
shall best attain to the desires of his life. 

— Beecher. 

No man knows what divine power or what divine 
peace is, until he is in sympathy with God, so that 
he can feel that all things are his because all things 
are renounced by him.— Robertson. 

9. Whereby shall I know that I shall inherit it? 
Behold a smoking furnace and a burning lamp. 

The holy men of old who had revelations from 
God, had outward signs besides the internal light 
of assurance in their own minds to testify to them 
that it was from God. Where the truth embraced 
is consonant to the revelation in the written word 
of God, or the action conformable to the dictates of 
right reason or holy writ, we may be assured that 
we run no risk in entertaining it as such. But it 
is not the strength of our private persuasion within 
ourselves that can warrant it to be a light or notion 
from heaven. 

How distinguish between delusions and the inspi- 



ASSURANCE. 17 

rations of the Holy Ghost. Satan can transform 
himself into an angel of light. 

There is no error to be named which has not had 
its professors: and a man shall never want crooked 
paths to walk in it he thinks that he is in the right 
way whenever he has the footsteps of others to 
follow. — Locke. 

We are not warranted under the Christian dis- 
pensation to require any miraculous intimation of 
the Divine Will : for the word of God alone is our 
guide and warrant. 

Remember thy word unto thy servant upon which 
thou hast caused me to hope. 

6 Remember, Lord, that Thou hast given this 
promise and encouraged my hope in it : and what- 
ever appearances may be, I must wait and pray for 
the accomplishment of it, for Thou wilt never disap- 
point the expectation which Thy own word hath 
excited.' 

'Without Thy counsel and providence, and with- 
out cause nothing cometh to pass in the earth.' 

10. I wait for the Lord, my soul doth wait, and in 
His word do I hope. 

6 A strange sweet sorrow about this deep trust — 
a repose born of sorrow and pain. I never felt it 
in a joyful mood : happiness never goes down so 
deep into the soul or raises the spirit up into such 
a calm solemn nearness to the eternal.' 

Blessed are all they that wait for Him. 



18 WAITING. 

' Little can we by the beginning of any action or 
event guess at God's intention in the conclusion. 
God sometimes disappoints us, exceeding our 
expectations, as well as at others falling short of 
them. Saul went to seek his father's asses, but 
found a kingdom and a crown.' 

It is doing a right thing and waiting to-day and 
weeks and months for a reward : so long that when 
it comes you cannot identify it with the action per- 
formed. It is living and working for truth and 
righteousness, and let the results come and mingle 
with the course of affairs. It is having faith in 
rectitude and in God, though you do not have visible 
results on which to base that faith. It is this that 
is the difficult thing. Here is the ground of super- 
lative training. God knows that you are going to 
live after to-day and to-morrow. He sees a road 
of exaltation in which you are to walk. He remem- 
bers that he is to lift you up. and crown you with 
eternal honors in heaven. — Beecher. 

' If need be, one must learn to wait his whole 
life, and expect the time of opportunity in another 
world. Crimes of every character, diseases of every 
name, infamy and shame, are the fit ills of him who 
will not learn to wait.' 

' Patience, what is long sought comes when 
unsought.' 

And blessed is she that believed, for there shall be 
a performance of those things which were told her 
from the Lord. 



FAITH. 19 

' All they that make his laws their choice shall 
in his promises rejoice.' 

For he performeth the thing that is apvointed for 
me. 

11. According to your faith he it unto you. 

He follows the Ruler with a full knowledge of 
the case, with warmest sympathy, but no flush of 
haste is on his cheek, nor does a line of impatience 
ruffle his placid brow. He will satisfy the Ruler's 
longing, but not till he has taught him a high lesson 
of patience and faith. . . ' She is dead, trouble 
not the master.' Faith reels under the blow. But 
Jesus will not permit it to fail. Everything depends 
on that mustard seed of faith in the Ruler's soul. 
Such is the decree of heaven — why, we need not ask 
too curiously, — that faith must wait for the gifts of 
grace. Faith must pluck the ripened fruit which 
can fall only into the believer's hand. Through all 
the previous suspense and tension of faith in the 
Ruler's soul, Christ has been preparing him to 
receive the answer of his prayer. This preparation 
was painful indeed. It consisted in taking down 
the supports of nature, that the sustaining power of 
grace might have room. While he rested in his 
own methods, fixed his own limits of time, and shut 
up the Holy One within the barrier of his own short 
sightedness, faith was but feebly at work. He had 
no adequate perception of the power he addressed. 
"We know not what our faith may cost : but if we 



20 DISTRUST. 

will boldly ask, if we have faith to hope, and 
patience to wait we shall, like the Rnler, rejoice at 
last in the power and grace of Jesus Christ. 

— Beecher. 

Trust and distrust are the day and night of the 
human soul. Out of the one issue light and courage, 
life and strength, liberty and joy : out of the other 
darkness and apprehension, weakness, bondage, and 
unhappiness. When Jesus said, According to your 
faith be it unto you, He uttered an infinite truth, 
that like the century plant presents its mysterious 
and patient leaves to the gaze of successive genera- 
tions, and only opens its wondrous blossoms to later 
eyes. — Helmer. 

It is impossible to calculate the effects which may 
be produced by distrust and suspense. They make 
the heart collapse, and wither the character. I 
believe that universal distrust would ruin any 
character. — Robertson. 

Mistrust of good success hath done this deed. 

O hateful error, melancholy's child ! 

Why dost thou show to the apt thoughts of men 

The things that are not ? 

Alas ! thou hast misconstrued everything, 

Didst thou not hear their shouts ? 

— Julius Caesar. 

The steward of my house is this Eliezur of Da- 
mascus. 

i He must yet live upon assurances and promises 



DISTRUST. 21 

without any earthly prospect. This works within 
him in a way of secret anguish.' 

Let us trust the time will come when the present 
moment shall be no longer irksome ; when we shall 
not borrow all our happiness from hope which is at 
last to end in disappointment. — Johnson. 

Lord, thou hast deceived me and I was deceived: 
thou art stronger than I and hast prevailed. 

' In a strict sense the Supreme Being can neither 
change His mind, nor falsify His word ; but He can 
make those changes in the course of His providence 
that have that appearance.' ' God may command 
what He has not decreed, as in slaying Isaac ; and 
decrees what He does not command, as in the death 
of His Son. Essential to prove the moral character 
and afford an opportunity for man to show his allegi- 
ance to God.' 

' Trutli i^ truth to the end of the reckoning.' 

Establish thy word to thy servant who is devoted to 
thy fear. 

Is not thy grace as mighty now 

As when Elijah felt its power? — 
When glory beamed from Moses' brow, 

Or Job endured the trying hour ? 

arm of the Lord ; awake, as in the ancient days, 
in the generations of old. 

Has not the Lord denied his aid 

"When earth and hell against me rose ? 
It is not so, but so it looks, 



22 DISTRUST. 

And we lose courage then, 
And doubts will come if God hath kept 
His promises to men. 

Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right? 

God's justice is a bed, 
Where we our weary heads may lay, 
And weary with ourselves may sleep 

Our discontent away. 

6 The language of some implies that the God of 
the universe had let go the helm or ceased to rule 
righteously. 

' The enemy is sometimes gratified by an arrange- 
ment of outward dispensations exactly suited to 
favor his assaults ; so that the believer's path seems 
wholly obstructed. The Lord himself appears to for- 
sake him, or even to fight against him, and his ap- 
pointments are thought contrary to his promises. 
This gives Satan an opportunity of suggesting hard 
thoughts of God and his ways ; doubts about the 
truths of the Scriptures, and desponding fears of a 
fatal event. Many such fiery darts may be repelled 
or quenched by the shield of faith ; but there are 
seasons when they are poured in so incessantly, and 
receive such plausibility from facts, that the enemy 
wounds him in his faith, understanding and conver- 
sation. 

< Bitter anguish have I borne, 
Keen regret my heart hath torn, 
Satan blinded me with lies ' — 



SORROW. 23 

He hath also taken me by my neck and shaken me 
to pieces, and set me up for his mark. Not for any 
injustice in mine hands. 

I have learned also to dread thy unsearchable 
judgments, who afflictest the just with the wicked, 
though not without equity and justice. — Kempis. 

' The Lord in His favor hath fixed the believer's 
safety firm as the deep-rooted mountains: but in 
everything else he may expect to be shaken.' 

6 Life has such hard conditions, that every dear 
and precious gift, every rare virtue, every pleasant 
faculty, every genial endowment, love, hope, joy, wit, 
sprightliness, must sometimes be cast into the cruci- 
ble to distill the one elixir — patience.' 

13. He hath made me desolate and faint all the 

day. 

* With weary steps I loiter on, 
Though always under altered skies, 
The purple from the distance dies, 
My prospect and horizon gone. 
* When the star of the evening shines out, 
Large and fair in the west, 
You will gather no hope from its rays, 
No promise of rest/ 

Remove thy stroke away from me. 1 am consumed 
by the blow of thine hand. 

At that time I was suffering under one of those 
heaven-sent blows, under which the strongest and 
most philosophic succumb for a time — many forever. 
As I was neither strong nor philosophic, the greatest 



24 THE heart's unknown, 

affliction man can suffer passed over me, and left me 
walking, eating, sleeping, but in the manner of those 
animals to which we anatomists attribute little or no 
self-consciousness in their actions, and no pleasure- 
in the fulfilment of them. We may be wrong ; the 
hungry looking arms of the anemone may obey a 
more than mere unconscious stimulus when they 
touch and secure their prey, but at all events, man 
who possesses all the nervous organization for being, 
doing and suffering is in as doubtful a case when in 
such circumstances as those to which I allude. — 
Harper's Weekly. 

15. The heart knoweth his own bitterness. 

Deep down within the labyrinth of the breast, 
Close veiled in shadows black as midnight air, 

A temple stands ; by human art ne'er dressed, 
For God's own mighty hand has reared it there* 

An altar high those temple walls contain, 

On which life's sacrifices oft are made ; 
Its surface streaked with many a bloody stain, 

That marked the cruel, sacrificial blade 
Within that gloomy, shadow-drap'd abode, 

The inmost soul unseen and unknown dwells, 
And bears about in solitude its load 

Of secret joys and griefs it never tells. — G. W. S. 

Who does not know that all the sternest conflicts 
of life can never be recorded ? Every human soul 
must walk alone through the darkest and most dan- 
gerous paths of its spiritual pilgrimage ; absolutely 



EXCISION. 25 

alone with God ! Much from which we suffer most 
acutely could never be revealed to others ; still more, 
could never be understood if it were revealed ; and 
still more, ought never to be repeated if it could be 
understood.— Mrs. Child. 

16. They shall put you out of the synagogues. 
What is a little scourge of the tongue ? What is 

a thrusting out of the synagogue ? The time of 
temptation will be when we are thrust into an inner 
prison and feel the iron entering into our souls. 
God's people may be permitted to forsake us for 
a while, but the Lord Jesus can stand by us. And 
if thou, dearest Redeemer, wilt strengthen me in 
my inner man, let enemies plunge me into a fiery 
furnace, or throw me into a den of lions ! Let us 
suffer for Jesus with a cheerful he-art. His love will 
sweeten every cup though never so bitter. — White- 
field. 

17. I will show him how great things he must suffer 
for my name. 

1 A steady, wise design through all their sufferings. ' 
In this life sorrows are crowned kings. Their 
crowns are iron. Midnight is in their eye. Awful 
sternness soems to be in their hearts. Men lie as 
victims in dungeons under the dominion of sorrow, 
and know not that in this strange way, God prepares 
men for coronation, and that these stern-browed kings 
of misery are after all but angels of mercy and of 
love. — Beecher. 
• 2 



26 ENCOURAGEMENT. 

Christian life ir not visible success ; very often the 
apparent opposite of success. It is -the resurrection 
of Christ working itself out in us ; but it very often 
is the cross of Christ imprinting itself on us very 
sharply. The highest prize God has to give us here 
is martyrdonio The highest style of life is heroic, 
enduring, manly love. The noblest coronet any son 
of man can wear, is a crown of thorns. — Robertson. 

* * the chastening rod 
Grows cool beneath his blessed feet, 
Whose form is as the son of God.' 

18. But he hnoweth the way that I take ; when he 
hath tried me I shall come forth as gold. 

Rejoice, our Marah's bitter springs 

Are sweetened; on our ground of grief 

Rise day by day, in strong relief, 

The prophecies of better things. — Whittier. 

May we be divinely strengthened to bear, and 
made wise to improve whatever dispensation is in 
store for us ; may we be enlightened to see in what- 
ever good or ill fortune, shall ensue, the loving kind- 
ness of a Father whose ver>y chastenings are more 
beneficent than the fullest gratification of our de- 
sires. — Greeley. 

Satan hath desired to have you that he may sift 
you as wheat. But I have prayed for thee that thy 
faith fail not: and when thou art converted, strengthen 
thy brethren. 



ENCOURAGEMENT. 27 

Be thou of such good courage, and so patient in 
hope, that when inward comfort is withdrawn, thou 
mayest prepare thy heart to suffer greater things, 
and do not justify thyself as though thou oughtest 
not to suffer these afflictions, or any so great ; hut 
justify me in whatsoever I appoint, and still praise 
my holy name. Stand to my good- will and thou 
shalt suffer no detriment at all. — Kempis. 

Faith loves to let him have his own way — extracts 
the honey of joy out of every daisy by the wayside — 
presses the wine of contentment out of every cluster 
of God's promises. — Beecher. 

1 With cheerful feet the path of duty run, 

God nothing does nor sutlers tc be done, 

But what thou would'st thyself, could' st thou but see 

Through all events of things as well as he/ 

19. All her persecutors overtook her in the midst 
of the straits. 

Frail and changeable in virtue, you might perhaps 
have been good under a series of auspicious circum- 
stances, but the glory had been to be victoriously 
good against malignant ones. — Foster. 

* * thou shalt know ere long, 
Know how sublime a thing it is 
To suffer and be strong 

o 

Longfellow. 

Because thou shalt forget thy misery and remember 
it as waters t-hat pass away. For he shall not much 



28 MYSTERY. * 

remember the days of his life because Grod answereth 
him in the joy of his heart. 

< I look to find thee in thy word 

Or at thy table meet.' 

I wait till from my veiled brows shall fall 

This baffling cloud, this wearying thrall 

Which holds me now from knowing all. 

— M. C. A. 

1 Hid in the everla sting deeps, 
The silent God His secret keeps.' 

If this invisible Being would only break that 
mysterious silence in which he has wrapt himself, 
we fed that a single word from his mouth would 
be worth a world of darkling speculations. 

— Chalmers. 

6 In the great mirror of eternity all the events of 
this checkered scene will be reflected. Pry not, 
then, curiously ; pronounce not censoriously on God's 
dealings with thee. Wait with patience till the 
grand day of disclosures.' 

In the latter days ye shall consider it perfectly,, 

' But in this life though there might be growth, 
it was the growth that comes from the pain endured 
with patience, through self-control maintained in 
the suspense and the anguish oi death ! 

6 In thee I trust, to thee sign, 
And lift my heavy soul on high ; 
For thee sit waiting all the day, 
And wear the tiresome hours away.' 



* MYSTERY. 29 

What does anxiety about future contingencies 
bring thee but sorrow upon sorrow, and consuming 
cares and disappointments, — anxieties from various 
attrition ? This mental condition robs life of its 
honey. — Beecher. 

Instead of learning the designs and character of 
the Almighty from his • own mouth, we sit in judg 
ment on them, and make cur conjecture of what 
they should be, take the precedency of his revelation 
of what they are. We do him the same injustice 
that we do to an acquaintance whose proceedings 
and intentions we venture to pronounce upon, while 
we refuse him a hearing, or turn away from the 
letter in which he explains himself. — Chalmers. 

Wherefore hath the Lord pronounced all this great 
evil against us > 

Ee thwarts you in the gaining of some object ; 
hard, but good. He is far better to you than if he 
had helped you to it.. — Shepard. 

I am the Lord thy Grod which teacheth thee to 
profit, which leadeth thee by the wag that thou 
shoiddest go. I have called him; I have brought him 
and he shall make his way prosperous. 

' Brought him step by step, quite beyond his own 
intentions.' 

20. I will allure her and bring her into the wilder- 
ness and give her her vineyards from thence. 

The promises designed to allure till their higher 
significatioi is reached. 



30 THE PROMISES. 

• 

The letter is but the body of the spirit in which 
it dwells, or the scaffolding which surrounds the 
building while the walls are going up, or the form 
which the living substance puts on to manifest itself 
and to perform its functions. — D. L. L. 

And this is what God does. His promises are 
true, though illusive; truer than we at first take 
them to be. We work for a mean, low, sensual 
happiness, all the while he is leading us on to a 
spiritual blessedness unfathomably deep. This is 
the life of faith. We do not preach that all is dis- 
appointment, the dreary creed of sentimentalism : 
but we preach that nothing here is disappointment, 
if rightly understood. He in whom God-like char- 
acter dwells, has all the universe for his own. 

— Robertson. 
Behold the days come that I ivill perform that good 
thing 1 have promised. 
22. In thine own dull and dreary state, 
To work and patiently to wait. 
Little thou think'st in thy despair, 
How soon the o'ershadowed sun may shine, 
And e'en the dulling clouds combine 
To bless with lights and hues divine, 

That region dark and bare — 
Those sad and sinful thoughts of thine. 

They that are Christ's have crucified the flesh with 
the affections and lusts. 

If thou wouldst be faithful to do the work that 
God hath appointed thee to do in this world for His 



HARD WORK. 31 

name, then beware thou do not stop and stick when 
hard work comes before thee. The word and spirit 
of God come sometimes like chain-shot to us, as if 
they would cut down all — as when Abraham was 
to offer up Isaac. Oh how willingly would our flesh 
and blood escape the cross for Christ ! With 
Epliraim, we like to tread out the corn, and to hear 
those pleasant songs and music that gospel sermons 
make, where only grace is preached, and nothing of 
our own duty as to works of self-denial. — Bunyax. 

23. Lord, I mil follow Thee, but let me go bid 
farewell. — If any man come to me and hate not his 
father and mother and wife and children, and brethren 
and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be 
my disciple. 

merciful Jesus, grant me but a small portion of 
Thy hearty affectionate love, that my faith may 
become more strong. How can I bear up myself 
in this miserable life, unless Thou strengthen me 
with Thy mercy and grace ? — Kempis. 

As for me is my complaint to man, and if it were 
so why should not my spirit be troubled? 

Lord, all my desire is before Thee. And the Lord 
said unto me, Let it suffice thee, speak no more unto 
me of this matter. 

That prayer which does not succeed in moderating 
our wish, in changing the passionate desire into 
still submission; the anxious, tumultuous expecta- 



32 SELF-DENIAL. 

4 

tion into silent surrender, is no true prayer, and 
proves that we have not the spirit of prayer. 

— Phelps- 

24. « Thankful I take the cup from Thee, 

Prepared and mingled by Thy skill, 
Though bitter to the taste it be.' 

Blessed and true is the comfort which is received 
inwardly from the truth. Let this be my consola- 
tion, to be cheerfully willing to do without all 
human comfort. — Kempis. 

When our energies demand sustenance they can- 
not get, when our will strains after a path it may 
not follow, we need neither starve from inanition, 
•nor stand still in despair. We have but to seek 
another nourishment for the mind, as strong as the 
forbidden food it longed to taste, and perhaps purer, 
and to hew out for the adventurous foot a road as 
direct and broad as the one fortune has blocked up 
against us, if rougher than it. — Charlotte Brokte. 

We talked about the different courses through 
which life ran. She (Miss Bronte) said in her own 
composed manner, as if she had accepted the theory 
as a fact, that she believed some were appointed 
beforehand to sorrow and much disappointment. 
That it did not fall to the lot of all, as Scripture 
told us, to havo their lines fall in plcnsant places: 
that it was well for those who had rougher paths to 
perceive that such was God's will concerning them, 



SELF-DENIAL. 33 

and try to moderate their expectations, leaving hope 
to those of a different doom, and seeking patience 
and resignation as the virtues they were to cultivate. 
She was trying to school herself against ever antici- 
pating any pleasure : that it was better to be brave 
and submit faithfully : there was some good reason 
which we should know in time why sorrow and dis- 
appointment were to be the lot of some on earth. 
It was better to acknowledge this, and face out the 
truth in a religious life. — Mrs. Gaskell. 

Every passion not merely kept in abeyance oy 
asceticism, but subdued by a higher impulse, is so 
much character strengthened — Beecher. 

' Self-indulgence has turned our love into selfish- 
ness, and now we shall return to love only through 
self-denial.' 

You would make a law for God prescribing the 
kind of death by which he shall destroy your self- 
love, and then, too, on the condition that self-love 
shall not die. — Fexelon. 

Give up anything, bear anything ; do anything, 
wait and suffer, work and pray. This is to be my 
heaven to see Him who fainted under the cross for 
me. — Kempis. 

25. I stand and knock. What then is this knock- 
ing ? It consists of every influence that addresses 
man's nobler nature and tends to bring him into 
right relations to God. — Beechee 



A o 



34 CHRIST. 

Come in, come in, thou waiting One, 

Thou man of kingly mien ! 
I open now this door of stone : 

How patient thou hast been ! 

X heard thee knocking long ago, 

But there were guests within. 
To turn them out I was too slow, 

I loved each bosom sin. 

But now come in ! the table spread ! 

Come in, I'll sup with thee ; 
Pcur out the wine Jiy soul hath bled, 

And break the bread for me. 

I charge you, tempters, never more 

Invade this sacred place ; 
Since Jesus has passed through the door, 

And 1 have aeen his face. 

Joy makes me humbler than my sin, 

That I should see his glory ! 
That I should say Christ # enter in, 

And know thee, and adore thee ! 

As my Father loved me so I also love you, said I 
unto my beloved disciples, whom certainly I sent not 
out to temporal joys, but to great conflicts ; not to 
honors, but to contempts ; not to idleness, but to 
labors ; not to rest, but to bring forth much fruit with 
patience. Go forward — the crown is before thee — a 
short labor and a great reward. — Kempis. 

When the will of God is known, wish it not 
changed. Cherish no wish to do otherwise than as 



HIS WORK. 35 

God allows. We must not only acknowledge, but 
acquiesce in the hand of God appointing us our lot. — 
Henry. 

26. He shall choose our inheritance for us. 

' He sets us in our appointed place ; gives us His 
Holy Spirit, His word, the examples of His saints, 
bright promises, awful warnings ; and then He ex- 
pects us to do cur part earnestly and seriously, with- 
out wavering or trifling.' 

Working in you that ivhich is icell-pleasing in His 
sight. 

' He leaves His servants each to work out some 
side of Christian truth, dividing to every man sever- 
ally as He will, according to the power of each mind 
and the needs of each situation.' 

' How slow we are to learn this simple truth, that 
we are safer and happier just where God would have 
us be, and doing just what He would have us do.' 

Blessed art thou — -fur flesh and blood hath not re- 
vealed it unto thee. — See that ye refuse not Him that 
speaketh. — And look that thou make them after the 
pattern that was showed thee in the mount. 

Sir Isaac Newton completed in his own person the 
character of the true philosopher. He not only saw 
the general principle, but he obeyed it. He both be- 
took himself to the drudgery of observation, and he 
endured the pain which every mind must suffer in 
the act of renouncing its old habits of conception. 
Have manhood and philosophy enough to make a 



36 HIS WORK. 

similar sacrifice. It is not enough that the Bible be 
acknowledged as the only authentic source of infor- 
mation respecting the details of that moral economy 
which the Supreme Being has instituted for the gov- 
ernment of the intelligent beings who occupy this 
globe.— Chalmers. 

"What portion then, of so high and sacred a mys- 
tery shall an unworthy sinner, dust and ashes, be 
able to search out and comprehend ? It is thy work 
and no human power. — Kempis. 

Do ye not understand, neither remember the jive 
loaves of the -five thousand, and how many baskets ye 
took up ? 

Deal courageously and the Lord will be with you. 

There is a real appearance of somewhat of great 
weight in this matter, though he is not able to satisfy 
himself thoroughly about it. Evidence which keeps 
the mind in doubt. — Butler. 

If this counsel or this ivork be of men, it will come 
to nought. But if it be of God ye cannot over- 
throw it. 

4 Time overthrows the illusions of opinion, but es- 
tablishes the decisions of nature.' 

' So far as a man is true to virtue, to veracity and 
justice, to equity and charity and the right of the 
case in whatever he is concerned, so far, he is on the 
side of the divine administration and co-operates 
with it.' ^ 



PREPARATION. 37 

27. Henceforth to heller purposes I devote my- 
self. — F. P. 

I prepare myself with cheerful willingness to be 
despised ana forsaken ot ail creatures, and to be 
esteemed quite entirely nothing. I cannot obtain 
inward peace and stability, nor be spiritually en- 
lightened, nor be fully united unto thee. — Kempis. 

* Dark, till in me thine image shine, 
And lost I am till thou art mine.' 

If thine eye offend thee pluck it out. 
Through desire a man having separated himself 
seekzth and intermeddleth with all wisdom. 

* separate from the world, 
His breast might duly take and strongly keep 
The print of heaven.' 

1 From nature's every path retreat.* 

And the Lord shut him in. 

Draw nigh to the Lord and he will draw nigh to 
you. 

If too, thou stand steadfast in all circumstances 
and do not weigh the things which thou seest and 
hearest by the outward appearance nor with a carnal 
eye, but presently m every affair dost enter with 
Moses into the tabernacle to ask counsel of the Lord, 
thou shall sometime* near the Divine Oracle, and 
shait return instructed concerning many things, both 
present and to come. — Kempis. 

Samuex could distinguish between the impulse, 



3o INSTRUCTION. 

quite a human one, which would have made him select 
Eliab out of Jesse's sons 9 and the deeper judgment 
by which the Lord said. Look not on his countenance 
or on the height of his stature ; because I have re- 
fused him ; for the Lord seeth not as man seeth ; for 
man.looketh on the outward appearance, but the 
Lord looketh on the heart. i)eep truth of character 
is required ; the whispering voices get mixed to- 
gether ; we dare not abide by our own thoughts. 
Only given to the habitually true to know the differ- 
ence. God is near you. Throw yourself fearlessly 
upon him, trembling mortal ! There is an unknown 
might within your soul which will wake when you 
command it. — Robertson. 

1 Energies that lono; have slumbered 
In its trackless depths unnumbered ; 
Speak the word ; the power divinest 
"Will awake, if thou inclinest.' 

Hearken* daughter ? and consider and incline thine 
ear, forget also thine own people and thy father's 
house, so shall the king greatly desire thy beauty, for 
he is thy Lord and worship thou Him. 

Whoso withdraweth himself from his acquaintance 
and friends, God will draw near to him with His 
holy angels. 

Withdraw thyself from gadding idly, and speaking 
vainly. — Kempis. 

6 A wise and pious man before all other knowledge 
prefers that ot God and his own soul.' 



BLESSEDNESS. 39 

4 He who does not know himself cannot know 
others. If you analyze one drop of water from a 
spring you know what every drop contains. If you 
know one man — -yourseli, you know them all in out- 
line and in elementary principles. Learning your 
own heart, you learn the hearts of others ; studying 
tfrc secret springs and motives and impulses that 
govern you, and making due allowance for the pecu- 
liarities oi constitution and training and surround- 
ings, you may draw . cry good conclusions concerning 
the characters ot chose around you and the considera- 
tions which will naturally impress their minds.' 

* We knov that these were felt by him, 
For these aru felt by all.' 

29. Blessed is the man whom thou choosest mvA 
causest to approach unto thee. 

i My soul invited by thy word stands watching at 
thy gate.' Since therefore it is thy pleasure and thou 
hast commanded that it should be so, this thy con- 
descension is also dearly pleasing unto me, and 0, 
that my iniquity maybe no hindrance. — Kempis. 

30. Cease ye from man ivhose breath is in his 
nostrils * for wherein is he to be accounted of? I 
ivih counsel thee, mine eye shall be upon thee. And 
thine ears shall hear a word behind thee saying, This 
is the way, ivalk ye in it. 

' An incomparable distance between the things 
which the imperfect imagine in their conceits and 



40 THE CREATOR. 

those which the illuminated are enabled to behold 
through revelation from above.' 

6 The former stagger in their counsels, are unstable 
and unsteady, and stumble at everything that lies in 
their way.' 

Enoch walked with Grod. 

Powerfully holding thee up, lest by thine own 
weight thou fall down to the things of earth. 

Lord, I stand in need of much greater grace, if I 
ought to reach that pitch where neither man nor any 
creature shall be a hindrance unto me. 

A man ought therefore to mount over all creatures, 
and perfectly to go out of himself and stand in 
ecstasy of mind and see that Thou, the Creator of 
all things, hast nothing amongst creatures like unto 
Thyself. — Kempis. 

But the soul* that ascends to the worship of the 
great God is plain and true : has no rose color, no 
fine friends, no chivalry, no adventures : does not 
want admiration, dwells in the hour that now is; 
in the earnest experience of the common day, by 
reason of the present moment and the mere trifle, 
having become porous to thought and bibulous of 
the sea of light. — Emerson. 

Surely the Lord is in this place, and I knew it 
not. 

1 So might we bouse a gentle guest, 
The Comforter in our lone breast, 
And feel e'en here the perfect rest 



THE CREATOR. 41 

tYhich follows when our will is past 

Into our Father's will at last — 

A heaven whose calm is ne'er o'ercast.' 

But none saith where is my Maker ivho giveth 
songs in the night ? 

How insupportable would be the days, if the 
night, with its dews and darkness, did not come to 
restore the drooping world ! As the shades begin 
to gather around us, our primeval instincts are 
aroused, and we steal forth from our lairs, like the 
inhabitants of the jungle, in search of those silent 
and brooding thoughts which are the natural prey 
of the intellect. — Thobeau. 

In thy lone and long night-watches, sky above and wave below, 
Thon didst learn a higher wisdom than the babbling schoolmen 

know, 
God's stars and silence taught thee, as His angels only can, 
That the one, sole, sacred thing beneath the cope of heaven is 

man. — Whitteek. 

Attentive, and with more delighted ear, 
Divine Instructor, I have heard, that when 
Cherubic songs by night from neighboring hills 
Aerial music send. — Miltox. 

Oh, sirs, there are moments in the history of men 
and of nations, when they stand so near the vail 
that separates mortals from immortals, men from 
their God, that they can almost hear the beating 
and feel the pulsations of the heart of the Infinite. 

— Gabfield. 



42 PEIDE. 

31. Of such an one ivill I glory : yet of myself 
will I not glory, but in mine infirmities. 

The intent of prophecy. But as for Me, this 
secret is not revealed for wisdom that I have more 
than any living, but for their sokes. And no man 
taketh this honor to himself, but he that is called of 
God. 

' Trust not in thine own knowledge, nor in the 
subtlety of any living creature, but rather in the 
grace of God, who helpeth the humble and humbleth 
those that be self-presuming.' 

For ivho maketh thee to differ, and what hast thou 
that thou didst not receive ? Now we have received 
not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of 
God — which things ive speak, not in the tvords tvhich 
man's wisdom teacheth, but tvhich the Holy Ghost 
teacheth. 

That I may discern between good and bad. 

God left Ilezekiah to try him, that He might know 
all that ivas within his heart in the business of the 
ambassadors of the princes of Babylon, who sent unto 
him to inquire of the wonder that was done in the 
land. Hezekiah rendered not again according to the 
benefit, for his heart was lifted up. 

4 O Pride ! the primal cause of all our woe.' 

Cowper to 31rs. Cowper in London. Though my 
friend, you may suppose, before I was admitted an 
inmate here, was satisfied that I was not a mere 
vagabond, and has since that time received more 



MIXED MOTIVES. 43 

convincing proof of my sponsibility , yet I could not 
resist the opportunity of furnishing him with ocular 
demonstration of it, by introducing him to one of 
my most splendid connexions ; that when he hears 
me called that fellow Cowper, which has happened 
heretofore, he may be able, upon unquestionable 
evidence, to assert my gentlemanhood, and relieve 
me of the weight of that opprobrious appellation. 
Oh pride ! pride ! it deceives with the subtlety of a 
serpent, and seems to walk erect, though it crawls 
upon the earth. How will it twist and twine itself 
about, to get from under the cross, which it is the 
glory of our Christian calling to be able to bear with 
patience and good-will. 

1. Behold my family is poor in JIanasseh, and I 
am the least in my father s how 

Oh mountain climbers, ye will fail 
The starry stairs to sec ! 
For heaven lies nearest that sweet vale — 
A child's humility.' 

2. Study to show thyself approved unto God, a 
workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly 
dividing the word of truth. 

He must keep the sacred treasure a distinct thing 
from the earthen vessel in which God has placed it, 
and whL: ie .r;;.iii;_"" presents the treasure, let him 
leave it submissive 60 his Master whether men shall 
honor or dash the vessel that contains it. — Hickok. 

Cursed be he that doeth the zvorlc of the Lord 
deceitfully. 



44 SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS. 

The happiness of the world is the concern of Him 
who is the Lord and Proprietor of it, nor do we 
know what we are about, when we endeavor to pro- 
mote the good of mankind in any ways but those 
which he has directed, that is, in all ways not con- 
trary to veracity and justice. I speak thus upon 
supposition of persons really endeavoring, in some 
sort, to do good without regard to these. But the 
truth seems to be, that such supposed endeavors 
proceed almost always from ambition, the spirit of 
party, or some indirect principle, concealed perhaps 
in great measure from persons themselves. — Butler. 

' We are willing to pay a price cbined out of our 
hearts for the coronation of our hearts, but seldom 
are we willing to suffer for others.' 

3. Depart ye, depart ye, go ye out from thence, 
touch no unclean thing, go ye out of the midst of her, 
be ye clean that bear the vessels of the Lord,. Pre- 
pare thine heart and stretch out thine hands toward 

Him. 

6 The best obedience of our hands 
Dares not appear before His throne.' 

Thou neither seest thy original nor actual infirm- 
ities : but hast such an opinion of thyself, and of 
what thou doest, as plainly renders thee to be one 
that did never see a necessity of Christ's personal 
righteousness to justify thee before God. 

Ignorance. — What ! you are a man for revelations ! 
I believe that what you and the rest of you say 
about that matter is but the fruit of distracted brains. 



FALSE PHILOSOPHY. 45 

Hopeful. — Why, man, Christ is so hid in God from 
the natural apprehensions of all flesh, that He cannot 
by any man be savingly known, unless God the 
Father reveals Him to them first. Also, when vre 
think that all our righteousness stinks in His nostrils, 
and that therefore He cannot abide to see us stand 
before Him in any confidence even of all our best 
performances. — Bunyan. 

4. Follow on to know the Lord. 

Venture with courage and faith on untried ex- 
plorations, like Columbus in search of a new con- 
tinent.— J. L. T. 

And yet I show unto you a more excellent way. 
Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy 
and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the 
rudiments of the world, and not after Christ. 

Thrice unhappy world, that takes Dryasdust's 
reading of the ways of God. — Carlyle. 

Henceforth ccdl ice no man master. Loose thyself 
from the bands of thy neck, captive daughter of 
Zion. Stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ 
has made us free. 

Henceforward I am the truths. I will have no 
covenants but proximities. I appeal from your 
customs. I will not hide my tastes or aversions, I 
will so trust what is deep is holy, that I will do 
strongly before the sun and moon, whatever may 
rejoice me and the heart appoints. — Emerson. 



46 god's truth. 

5. For the Lord Grod spake thus to me with strong 
hand and instructed me, that 1 should not walk in the 
way of this people — neither fear ye their fear, nor be 
afraid. Sanctify the Lord of hosts Himself, and He 
shall be for a sanctuary. 

' Endeavor to know God's will by studying His 
word, observing His providence, and considering the 
promptings ol His spirit within you when asking 
counsel at the throne ot grace, and having ascer- 
tained His will with reierence to His service, do it at 
all hazards and at any sacrifice.' 

A hand ! A cloud tormed hand ! 

The hand God's chosen find, 
Always revealed to point before, 

When God is close behind. 

Sound appreciation and just decision as to all the 
objects that come round about you ; and the habit of 
behaving with justice and wisdom. Rarely should a 
man speak at all unless it is to say that thing that is 
to be done, and let him go and do his part in it and 
say no more about it. — Carlyle. 

6. Timothy, keep that ivhich is committed to thy 
trust, avoiding profane and vain babblings and oppo- 
sitions of science falsely so called. 

' It must gird itself to the sublimest task that the 
intellect has ever yet proposed: — to organize the 
comprehensive results of the world's thinking and 
co-ordinate the varied and fragmentary truths of re- 
search into one grand organon of principles, that 



THE SHEPHERD BOY. 47 

shall be a faithlul reflex of the verity of things ; 
that shall combine the authenticity of science with 
the full breadth of nature, and become a guiding and 
trusting light to man through the vicissitudes of his 
earthly experience. In the din and chaos of sects 
and parties, in the confusion of doctrines and con- 
flict of opinions, amid the gropings of despondency 
and the exaltations of hope, we yearn for the voice 
of nature, for the consolations and encouragements 
of a philosophy which has the divine warrant of 
accordance with the realities of the universe.' 

7. They brought him to the startling brink, 
But he in fear recoiled : 
And none was found to try the depth — 
The day's high sport was spoiled. 

At length, a thought broke on his mind, 

His face lit up with hope ; 
I'll venture down the rocks, he cried, 

If father holds the rope. 

Down, down, that awful depth of rock 

The father held his boy, 
"While he his bosom tilled with flowers, 

'Mid rapturous shouts of joy. 

Down clouds and mists our Father lets 

His chain of promises ; 
And from His holy height He draws 

His children to the skies. 

O child of earth ! with fear appalled, 
When oft thy path is cleft ; 



48 FRESH OIL. 

Though hanging on the abyss of doom, 
Be not of hope bereft. 

Whate'er His voice commands thee do 

Nor count the sacrifice ; 
Go where the many dare not go, — 

Pluck nowrets for the skies. 

Our Father holds the rope, Amen ! 

The rocks are deep below : 
But fearless we will swing and work, 

Till heaven our trophies show. 

8. 1 shall be anointed with fresh oil. 

The interpreter answered, the fire is the work of 
grace that is wrought in the heart; he that casts 
water upon it, is the devil ; but in that thou seest 
the fire notwithstanding, burn higher and hotter, 
thou shalt also see the reason of that. So he had 
him about to the back of the wall where he saw a 
man with a vessel of oil in his hand, of the which he 
did continually cast, but secretly into the fire. — 

BUNYAN. 

Thou, therefore, my son be strong in the grace that 
is in Christ Jesus. 

Confide in His love, avail yourself of His power > 
and demean yourself worthy of so precious a rela- 
tion. — Winslow. 

9. Ahvays delivered unto death for Jesus' sake. 
While we look not at the things which are seen. 
Moses germinated in the solitude of the wilderness 

when he lay in the grave of selfishness for forty long 



TRANSITION. 49 

weary years. Here in the garb of a vagrant Arab, 
away from all the royal luxuries in which he had 
been brought up, he obtained his glorious idea, ' I 
shall redeem this people at last.' And, by virtue of 
the inspiration thereof, he showed himself at the 
court of Egypt again, as the veritable ambassador*of 
God come to emancipate a nation of slaves, and ulti- 
mately 'led his people' out of the land of 'the op- 
pressor just as miraculously as. Luther delivered the 
Germans from papal power. . . Hence Moses must 
have passed from the outward to the inward. Where 
else could he have obtained this omnipotent wand ? 
Not certainly in dominions of sense. . . Can we not 
say that conscience and reason always point a moni- 
tory finger to the right place for us to fall into the 
ground and die ; to the place where, how great soever 
the outward adversity, true happiness flows into our 
being, as new life and joy flow into the bulb that lies 
buried in the cold but creative earth ? But this, 
people <are not far advanced enough to realize. They 
persist to their detriment, in remaining on the sur- 
face of life, where they are ultimately destroyed by 
the pleasant but baneful influences that induced 
them to prefer it to the redemptive soil beneath — 
erroneously founding their hopes of happiness on 
their sensuous experiences, they take the appearance 
for the reality ; and as this mistake involves a loss 
of the object in the method, hence arises all their 
misery. . . But this state of affairs will always be, 



50 THE OBLATION. 

until people fall into the ground and dying there, re- 
produce themselves in new glory, as the men they 
worship have done — fall into the dark but beneficial 
soil of self-denial, where they alone can germinate 
into the higher life in God, wherein the entire race 
is destined to dwell at last, freed from the inimical 
influences that conspire to prevent them from cross- 
ing its threshold. — Lepper. 

Do thou, Lord, assist me against all worldly wis- 
dom and understanding ; do this, thou must do it, thou 
alone ! It is not indeed my cause, but thine own. 
Come, oh come, I am ready even to give up my life 
patiently, like a lamb, for the cause is just : it is 
thine, and I will not depart from thee eternally. This 
I resolve in thy name. The world cannot force my 
conscience ; and should my body be destroyed therein, 
my soul is thine, and remaineth with thee forever. — 
Luther. 

Of my own will did I offer myself unto God the 
Father, for thy sins ; my hands being stretched forth 
on the cross, and my body laid bare, so that nothing 
remained in me that was not wholly turned into a 
sacrifice for the appeasing of the divine Majesty. . . 
But if thou dost not offer up thyself freely unto my 
will, thy oblation is not entire, neither will there 
be perfect union between us. — Kempis. 

i And faith has still its Olivet, and love its Galilee.' 



A DIFFICULT TASK. 51 

10. I know thy burden, child ; I shaped it, 

Poised it in mine own hand, made no proportion 

In its weight to thine unaided strength ; 

For ever as I laid it on, I said 

I shall be near, and while she leans on me 

This burden shall be mine, not hers. 

— Messenger. 
To each duty performed there is assigned a degree 
of mental peace and high consciousness of honor- 
able exertion oorresponding to the difficulty of the 
task accomplished. That rest of the body which 
succeeds to hard and industrious toil is not to be 
compared to the repose which the spirit enjoys under 
similar circumstances. — W. Scott. 

He found himself in some sort compelled to un- 
dertake a work from which he shrank, and for which 
he felt no special aptitude. The nature of the work 
made him draw back. He was called upon to write 
the life of one whom he had known intimately, had 
loved and honored. It requires no sacrifice of feel- 
ing to analyze most minutely the character of one's 
imaginary hero. There the intellect feels no re- 
straint ; but to grope about in the heart of a dead 
friend, no matter how pure one may feel it to be, 
creates a revulsion of feeling. Yet the analysis must 
be made, and happily for him, with his interest in 
psychology, there existed a continual restraint upon 
a mere prying intellectualism in the reverence which 
he felt for the dead. . . In writing the lives of emi- 
nent Christians, biographers made the mistake of 



52 A BIOGRAPHER AT WORK. 

treating religion as the end to be attained, instead 
of a vital power at work in the soul. Indeed, he 
added, the very failure which you affirm of this class 
of writings demonstrates the high place in art which 
this class occupies. The easiest life to write is that 
which is most outward. A life of adventure is the 
lowest form of biography. The hardest life to write 
is that which demands a record because of its strong 
character, and the highest form of biography is that 
which undertakes to display character through a 
representation of those forms which in actual life 
best contain and exhibit it. And what order of 
character presents to the biographer more glorious 
opportunities and greater perplexities than that which 
displays a new force revolutionizing it ? The meshes 
of a man's inner life are not easy to trace, and when 
the great Weaver is busy in weaving the excellent 
pattern of Christ, the task of tracing becomes more 
difficult, healthy, instructive, yet very interesting. . . 
Novelists suffer their characters to work out their 
own destiny. Why should not biography borrow the 
same aid, and taking the life of some person quite 
unknown to fame, but having a strongly marked 
character, set forth the growth of that character un- 
der its changing experience of life ; sketching with 
such fullness as need be, the world of nature and 
society, in which it moved, and showing how it was 
renewed and sanctified by Divine grace ? In fact, 
beginning with chiseling a figure in basso relievo, 



A BIOGRAPHER AT WORK. 53 

our friend proceeded to execute it in alto relievo, ancj 
finally constructed a detached statue. Nor was he* 
unmindful of what may be called the proportions of 
breadth. The character has its whimsical side, but 
if that be unduly dwelt upon for the sake of making 
the general effect light and agreeable, the result may 
be to produce unjust contempt : so a cheerful mouth 
may from the painter's over anxiety to preserve the 
cheerful lines, be made to express a repulsive smirk. 
All this care could easily be fatal to success, unless 
he secured the presence of a still higher element, 
more intelligible than these. It was necessary that 
throughout his work, the shadow of the man himself 
should some how rest upon it — life-likeness, which 
cannot be super imposed, nor interposed, but sup- 
posed, the most elusive element to be reached after. 
The rest could in some sort be attained by study and 
carefully won, but this lay outside of any special 
effort and was rather the reward of patient labor in 
other directions. He possessed the more valuable aid 
of an affectionate enthusiasm for his subject. — The 
world does not want exact lines in the portraits of its 
hero's face, nearly so much as warm life which can 
make it believe in the existence of a common nature. 
To the biographer there fell rewards he had not an- 
ticipated — more absorbing in interest. At first he 
tried to escape from it, oppressed by this constant 
visitor. He fled for relief to other pursuits, and dis- 
tracting entertainments, until he became reconciled 



54 A BIOGRAPHER AT WORK. 

to the constant presence and found it a quiet joy. — 
Much to live with a good man day after day, think 
of his character, though, indeed, it often utters its 
silent reproof: — to inquire into his source of power, ' 
and to be so at one with him, that for a time you 
have also the same earnestness of purpose, thrilled 
with the same enthusiasm, and go with him through 
the scenes which tried his soul, as if you were under- 
going the same experience. The oblique light, too, 
which our friend's study cast on other matters which 
interested him, was often more valuable than the 
direct rays. Indeed, there seemed to him no other 
study, except the study of the life of Christ, which 
was so productive as the life of one man. You live, 
he would say, for months in the company of a single 
person ; you are let into the secrets of his life which 
only he and you may know ; you analyze his life, 
and reconstruct it in your memorial, and by all this 
study you get a deeper insight into the human heart 
than would be possible by any general study of classes 
of men, or movements; an history far deeper cer- 
tainly, than it is possible to get, through mere famil- 
iarity with many living faces. But when all is done, 
when you have tried to fathom this one man's heart, 
you know that you have only troubled the waters 
with your lead, that deeper than any plummet of the 
human intellect can sound, lie depths of the soul ; 
and you arise from your task with new conceptions 
of the worth of humanity, and profounder views of 



RJBERT30N. 55 

that redemption which was so costly because the ruin 
was so great. — New Englandeb. 

I could inform the dullest author how he might 
write an interesting book. Let him relate the events 
of his own life with honesty, not disguising the feel- 
ings which accompanied them. I never yet read 
even a Methodist's experience in the Gospel Mes- 
senger without instruction ; and I should almost 
despair of that man who could peruse the Life of 
John Woodman without amelioration of heart. 

— Coleridge. 

12. My life, if I may judge by the decline of 
mental accuracy, has got more than half-way, and 
the rest is down hill. The half-way house is behind: 
and if Brighton be another form of Cheltenham, 
home cannot be very far off. I am getting tired. 
And the complexion of my spontaneous thoughts 
now, is increasing the contemplation of rest. Rest 
in God and love. Deep repose^in that still country 
where the mystery of this strange life is solved, and 
the most feverish heart lays down its load at last. 

— Robertson. 

People were solemnly warned against him. Those 
who knew little of his doctrines and less of himself, 
attacked him openly with an apparently motiveless 
bitterness. He had dared to be singular, and that 
in itself was revolutionary. — Brooke. 

i There runs a record that not only saitk 

He loved his own. but loved them to the end; 



56 TWO CHARACTERS. 

So evermore a man shall love his friend, 
With friendship that outliveth life and death/ 

Wherefore, then, were ye not afraid to speak 
against my servant Moses ? 

13. « See there ! for this man, too, life's toil is over, 

His words are all said out, his deeds are done : 
For this man, too, there comes a rest, however 
Unquiet passed his time beneath the sun. 

You said what seemed you best; your life's poor fountain 
Just bubbled ; while his soared or shuddered down. 

You chid him, as a tired boy chides a mountain ; 

You frowned on him, and thought God too must frown. 

His worst thought was so great, your best so little, 
Your best and worst not yours ; his all his own. 

You ran the world's safe way ; he dared to thwart it. 
You stood with thousands by you — he alone. 

Therefore, when God shall judge the world, I take it, 

He will not mete this man by rule and line ; 
Who felt no common thirst, nor feared to slake it 

From that which flowed within him — the divine. 

O, think you God loves our tame-leveled acres 

More than the proud ditch of some heaven-kissed hill-? 

Man's straight-dug ditch, more than his own free river 
That wanders, he regarding, where it will ? 

Enough : high words abate no jot or tittle 

Of what, while man still lasts shall still be true, 

Heaven's great ones must be slandered by earth's little, 
And God makes no ado. 



HIS FATHER IS A KING. 57 

Take heed you treat him well, forget it not, 

Look not upon him with disdainful eyes, 
For though just now he seems of lowly lot, 

He is a prince, believe me, in disguise. 

His title is secure, it cannot fail ; 

His realm is wise, and as a garden fair. 
The sweetest odors float on every gale, 

The brightest rivers flow and murmur there. 

He does not seem of rank or wealth possessed, 
A poor unlettered man he meets you now, 
• But soon a star will glitter on his breast, — 
A golden crown will rest upon his brow. 

He often walks among you ; treat him well, 

This heir-apparent in a beggar's guise. 
Lest, looking up, you meet displeasure fell 

Flashing upon you from a Father's eyes. 

What though his garb is often poor and mean, 

He wears upon his hand a signet ring, 
And goes attended by a guard unseen, 

Fit guard f or onc w l 10se Father is a King.' 

Lent. — Whether or not periodical self-denial in 
matters of common comfort conduce to form the true 
Christian, is a proper question for churches to decide. 
It is a question, however, on which they disagree. 
It is strenuously maintained, on the one hand, that 
such temporary abstinences increase the power to 
withstand temptation to really sinful indulgence — 
that they are to the Christian what his daily drill 
and constant target practice are to the soldier. On 
3* 



58 ABSTINENCE FROM MEATS. 

the other hand it is urged, that our sins so beset us, 
that there is no need of sham-fighting and target 
shooting to learn the art of Christian warfare— that 
this setting up of straw devils to shoot at, when the 
real article is so very convenient, indicates anything 
but a true appreciation of the condition of fallen 
humanity. While, however, we admit that the 
matter of self-denial comes fairly within the juris- 
diction of the divine, we must insist that the matter 
of diet belongs as exclusively to the physician. The 
machinery of the human system is so delicate and 
complex that the best of them tinker at its disorders 
as clumsily as a blacksmith would tinker a watch. 
Nevertheless they do know something of their 
business. 

In the evil clays of the later Roman Empire, and 
of the semi-pagan Christianity that satisfied the low 
intelligence of the times, Asceticism borrowed, 
among other heathen notions, the idea that the devil 
in us could be starved and flagellated out of exist- 
ence. They mistook the decline of vitality for a 
real 4 conquest over the flesh.' 

It is not for us to say what is appropriate diet for 
other countries, but when the lineal successors of 
St. Simon Stylites begin to tamper with the New 
England stomach, they lay their clumsy hands on a 
very delicate matter. Our digestion is our weakest 
point. Physicians tell us that the New Englander 
inclines too little to solid food, and too much to 



EENUNCIANTS. 59 

pastry and confectionery. Why not demand absti- 
nence from them and not from meat? A forty 
days general abstinence from intoxicating drinks 
would go far to empty our jails and station-houses. 
Then continue the fast 325 days longer, and you 
would have the blessedest year America ever saw. 
How much also of the emigrants hard-earned money 
is perverted into tobacco ? Would not a forty days' 
abstinence from this filthiness show substantial 
results ? — Hickox. 

The trials that those men do meet withal, 
That are obedient to the heavenly call, 
Are manifold and suited to the flesh. 
O let the Pilgrims, let the Pilgrims, then 
Be vigilant, and quit themselves like men. 

— BUNYAK, 

Hitherto there have been these two classes, renun- 
ciants and drunken devotees, — those on the one 
hand who descend into the plain, and are full soon 
down-bore and destroyed: those on the other, who 
know no safety but by deprecation and flight. But 
the constructive soul must come : the mediator living 
and doing in the world, showing power, conquest 
among men, but not of them ; translating into life, 
hallowing all the relations. Long time it must take 
to realize this gospel everywhere, in the gold market, 
the hustings, sanctifying trade, house-keeping, Wall 
street, Washington : but it is written in the leaf of 
destiny. There can and there will be mingling 



60 KING henry's penance. 

without degradation, love that shall be worship, 
chastened and sober, battle that shall be strength 
and perpetual victory. — Mills. 

King Henry's Penance. Ranulfus de Glanville, 
with a body of horse, in which were about four 
hundred knights, after a hard day's inarch, arrived 
at Newcastle. There he was told that William the 
Lion, instead oi repressing, encouraged the devasta- 
tion committed by the marauders, and, believing 
that there was no longer any army to face him, 
entirely neglected all the usual precautions of mili- 
tary discipline. The gallant. sheriff resolved to push 
forward next morning in the hope of relieving 
Alirwick, and surprising the besiegers. The English 
accordingly began their march at break of day, and, 
though loaded with heavy armor, in five hours had 
proceeded nearly thirty miles from Newcastle. As 
they were then traversing a wild heath among the 
Cheviot Hills, they were enveloped in a thick fog, 
and the advice was given that they should try to 
find their way back to Newcastle ; but Glanville, 
rather than stain his character with the infamy of 
such a flight, resolved to proceed at all hazards, and 
his men gallantly followed him. They proceeded 
some miles in darkness, being guided by a mountain 
stream, which they thought must conduct them to 
the level country. Suddenly the mist dispersed, and 
they saw before them in near view the castle of Aln- 
wick beleaguered by straggling bands of Scots, and 



KING HENRY S PENANCE. 61 

the Scottish Bang amidst a small troop of horsemen 
diverting himself with the exercises of chivalry, 
free from any apprehensions of danger. William at 
first mistook ihe English for a party of his own 
countrymen returning loaded with the sports of a 
foray. Perceiving his error, he was undismayed, 
and calling out, ' Xoo it will be seen whilk be true 
knichts,' he instantly charged the enemy. In a few 
minutes he was overpowered, unhorsed, and made 
prisoner. Some of his nobles coming to the rescue, 
and finding their efforts ineffectual, voluntarily threw 
themselves into the hands of the English, that they 
might be partakers in the calamity of their sovereign. 
It so happened that the same hour at which William 
was taken :.t Alnwick, Henry had been doing 
penance at the tomb of St. Thomas of Canterbury. 
Alarmed by the dangers which surrounded him from 
domestic and foreign enemies, and dreading that he 
had offended Heaven by the rash words he had 
spoken, which led to the martyrdom of the Arch- 
bishop, he had thought it necessary to visit the 
shrine of the new saint. At the distance of three 
miles, discovering the towers of Canterbury Cathe- 
dral, he alighted from his horse and walked thither 
barefoot, over a road covered with rough and sharp 
stones, which so wounded his feet that in many 
places they were stained with his blood. His bare 
back was then scourged at his own request by all 
the monks of the convent, and he continued a whole 



62 KING HENRY'S PENANCE. 

day and night before the tomb, kneeling and lying 
prostrate on the hard pavement, employed in prayer, 
and without tasting nourishment. He then journeyed 
on to Westminster, and he was lying in bed very 
sick from the penance he had undergone, when, in 
the dead of night a messenger, stained with the soil 
of many comities, arrived at the palace, and declaim 
ing that he was the bearer of important dispatches, 
swore that he must see the king. The warder of 
the gate, and the page at the door of the bed-chamber 
in vain opposed his entrance, and, bursting in, he 
announced himself as the servant of JRanulfus de 
Glanville. The question being asked, ' Is all well 
with your master ? ? he answered^ ' All is well, and 
he has now in his custody your enemy the King of 
Scots.' ' Repeat those words/ cried Henry in e- 
transport of joy. The messenger repeated them,, 
and delivered his dispatches. Henry having read 
them was eager to communicate the glad tidings to 
his courtiers, and, expressing gladness to Ranulfu. 4 
de Glanvillo, piously remarKed that the glorious 
event was to be ascribed to a higher power, for it 
happened while he was recumbent at the shrine of 
St. Thomas. — Campbell's Chief Justices. 

Br. Johnson. — One morning afterwards when I 
found him alone, ne communicated to me with solemn 
earnestness a very remarkable circumstance which 
had happened in tho course of his illness, when he 
was much distressed by the dvemf. He had shut 



CHANCE. 63 

himself up and employed a day in particular exer- 
cises of religion — lasting, humiliation, and prayer. 
On a sudden, he obtained extraordinary relief, for 
which he looked up to heaven with grateful devotion. 
He made no direct inference from that fact, but from 
his manner oi telling it, I could perceive that it ap- 
peared to him as something more than an incident 
in the common course of events. — Boswell. 

16. ' Such wonders never come by chance, 

Nor can the winds such blessings blow.' 

True, the salt seems in every instance to have been 
abstracted and locked up by accident ; but the re- 
currence of the accident in every geologic formation, 
demonstrates it to be one of those on which the 
adept in the doctrine of chances might safely calcu- 
late. It seems an accident of the fixed elass, on 
Goldsmith bases his well-known reflection in 
the Yicar of Wakefield. 4 To what a fortuitous con- 
currence do wc not owe every pleasure and conven- 
ience of our lives ! How many seeming* accidents 
must unite before we can be clothed or fed ! The 
peasant must be disposed to labor, the shower must 

1, the wind fill the merchant's sail, or numbers 
must want the usual supply. — Hugh Miller. 

What can be more foolish than to think that all 
this rare fabric of heaven and earth could come to- 
gether by chance, when all the skill of art is not able 
to make an oyster ?— Taylor. 



64 TWO WORLDS. 

So long as he sought the Lord, Giod made him to 
prosper. 

I never lost my hope. I looked to the coming 
spring as full of responsibilities, but I had bodily 
strength and moral tone enough to look through them 
to the end. A trust based on experience as well as 
promises bouyed me up at the worst of times. Call 
it fatalism as you ignorantly may, there is that in the 
story of every eventful life, which teaches the ineffi- 
ciency of human means, and the present control of a 
Supreme agency. — See how often relief has come at 
the moment of extremity, in forms strangely un- 
sought, almost at the time unwelcome. — See still 
more how the back has been strengthened to its in- 
creasing burden, and the heart cheered by some con- 
scious influence of an unseen Power. — Kane. 

Sow hast thou helped him that is without power! 
Sow hast thou counseled him that hath no wisdom ! 

20. And the Lord said unto him, Go through the 
midst of the city, through the midst of Jerusalem and set 
a mark upon the foreheads of the men that sigh and cry 
for all the abominations that be done in the midst 
thereof. 

For that righteous man dwelling among them, in 
seeing and hearing vexed his righteous soul from day 
to day. 

To be where we and those around us are liviag m 
two different worlds of feeling, is tenfold more intol- 
erable than to be where a foreign language, not <m 



ONE LOOK, 65 

word of which we understand is spoken all day long. 
And if there be any part of our nature which is essen- 
tially human, and to effect the excision of which 
would destroy its humanity, it is the craving for 
sympathy . — Robertson. 

I often accuse my finest acquaintances of an im- 
mense frivolity. Several of them are decidedly pachy- 
dermatous. I say it in sorrow, not in anger. How 
can a man behold the light who has no answering 
light ? They are true to their sight, but when they 
look this way they see nothing. For the children of 
light to contend with them is as if there should be a 
contest between eagles and owls. What stuff is that 
man made of who is not co-existent in our thought 
with the purest and subtlest truth ? We select granite 
for the underpinning of our houses and barns ; we 
build fences of stone ; but we do not ourselves rest 
on an underpinning of granite truth, the lowest primi- 
tive rock : — we do not teach one another the lessons 
of honesty and sincerity that the brutes do, or of 
steadiness and solidity that the rocks do. — Thoreau. 

But while my sad bewildered view, 
The wide confusion vainly traces. 
One look I see serenely true, 
Amid the false and loveless faces. 

A voice not loud, uke wind or wave, 
A look made low by conscious greatness, 
Where all is calm, and deep and grave, 
With a full soul's mature sedateness. 



66 DEJECTION. 

By His mild glance and sober power, 
Renewed to tranquil aspiration, 
The sounds of surging riot cease. 

— Hymns of a Hermit. 

21. When the world appears apostate, 
And Love's labor all in vain, 
When I'm sick of sin and being, 
Struck with Doubt's most deadly pain, * 
Tell me that there is no secret 
. In man's guilt or woe to thee : 
And with droppings of thy patience 
And thy peace, O quicken me. 

The dejection I sometimes labor under, seems not to 
rise from doubts of my acceptance with God, though 
it tends to produce them ; nor from desponding views 
of my own backwardness in the divine life, for I am 
more prone to dependence and self-conceit, — but from 
the prospect of the difficulties I have to encounter in 
the whole of my future life. (His subsequent suffer- 
ings greater than he forsaw.) — Such a painful year 
I never passed, owing to the privations I have been 
called to on the one hand, and the spectacle before 
me of human depravity on the other. But I hope I 
have not come to this seat of Satan in vain. — Henry 
Martyn. 

4. We have been proclaiming the Gospel in the 
Burman Empire, with China on one side and India 
on the other ; Bhud and his monstrous fables de- 
ceiving 400,000 on our right ; and Brahma with his 
metaphysical atheism chaining down 100,000 on our 



GROWTHS OF CIVILIZATION. 67 

left; whilst the base imposter Mohammed, rages 
against the Deity and Sacrifice of the blessed Saviour 
in the midst of both, with 10,000 or 20,000 of follow- 
ers. But our Divine Lord shall ere long reign, and 
Bhuddist and Brahmanist, and Mohammedan — yea, 
the infidel and papist, and nominal Christian through- 
out Asia shall unite in adoring his cross. — Bishop 
Wilson. 

If you count all the growths of civilization for cen- 
turies, man is greatly superior to the animal. But 
what a condition of the world is that in which if you 
should destroy half its population, there would not 
be missed one treasure, one impulse, or one aspira- 
tion ! — Beecher. 

Lord, when saw we thee an hungered? 
' Oh, you who buy and sell cotton in Xew York, 
and are changers of money there and merchants be- 
yond the seas ; and you who float softly over carpets 
in palatial rooms and bridge over spaces in easy 
duties with music and the languid culture of the 
Arts '— 

An English gentleman is generally highly educa- 
ted. Society consists of cultivated persons, male 
and female, whose accomplishments are not displayed, 
but exist as a matter of course, and as essential to 
one's part in the duties and civilities of life. Xo one 
ventures to feel better informed than his neighbors, 
and hence there is a general deference to other men's 
opinions, and a reserve hi expressing one's own which 



68 NOTHING TO CONFER. 

is highly significant of extreme civilization and re- 
finement. Such a state of society, however, has its 
drawbacks. Character often becomes neutralized, 
and genius itself dulled and flattened, when to dis- 
tinguish one's self is felt to be an impropriety, and 
where the manifestation of decided thought or feel- 
ing would be eccentric and even rude. Hence, I ob- 
served a sort of uniformity in manner and expression 
which is sometimes depressing ; and when upon some 
private occasion I have discovered that the smooth, 
quiet personage whom I had seen in the dull pro- 
priety in which the pressure of company had held 
him like a single stone in an arch, was a man of 
feeling, of taste, of varied information, #,nd accurate 
learning, I' said to myself, what a lamentable waste 
is here ! This man who should have been enriching 
the world with his stores of erudition, and of reflec- 
tion has never conceived of himself as having any- 
thing to impart, or by which his fellow men should 
profit. His accomplishments are like his fortune and 
respectability — his mere personal qualifications for a 
position in society, in which he is contented to move 
merely without shining or dispensing anything more 
than the genial warmth of good humor and benevo- 
lence. There are thousands of such men in Eng- 
land ; living and dying in the most exquisite relish 
of social pleasures, and deriving daily satisfaction 
from their own mental resources, but contributing 
nothing to the increase of the world's intellectual 



THE LABORING MAN. 69 

wealth, and never dreaming of their attainments as 
talents which they are bound to employ. They live 
among educated men ; knowledge is a drug in the 
market, and what have they to confer ? — A. C. Coxe. 
He that withholdeth corn, the people shall curse 
him : but blessing shall be upon the head of him that 
selleth it. 

King Henry to Wolsey. — 

I presume, 
That as my hand hath opened bounty to you. 
My heart dropp'd love, my power rained honor more 
On you than any : — So your hand and heart. 
Your brain, and every function of your power, 
As 'twere in love's particular, be more 
To me, your friend, than any ? 

* * Xature never lends 
The smallest scruple of her excellence, 
But, like a thrifty goddess, she determines 
Herself the glory of a creditor, 
Both thanks and use. — Shakspeare. 

I can measure the profitless non-observing routine 
of the past winter by my joy at this first break in 
upon its drudgery. God knows I had laid down for 
myself much experimental observation, and some 
lines of what I hoped would be valuable travel and 
search ; but I am thankful that I am here, able to 
empty a slop-bucket *or rub a scurvied leg. The 
moral value of this toilsome month to myself has 
been the lesson of sympathy it has taught me with 
the laboring man. The fatigue, and disgust, and 
secret trials of the overworked brain are bad 



70 LONDON POOR. 

enough, but not to me more severe than those which 
follow the sick and jaded body to a sleepless bed. — 
Kane. 

Starvation Fever. — The revelation has startled 
clever editors who took it for granted that rapidly- 
increasing national wealth must necessarily remove 
the causes of destitution. If they would take a 
little more heed of what is going on around, they 
would know from facts and figures, collected by men 
in the public service, and published by order of the 
House of Commons, that privation and starvation 
are the normal state of the bulk of the working 
population. — London Sun Cor. 

London Poor. — Depressed by the sight of so much 
misery, and uninventive of remedies for the evils 
that force themselves on my perception, I can do 
little more than recur to the idea already hinted 
(a deluge). So far as these children are concerned, 
at any rate, it would be a blessing to them. This 
heroic method of treating human maladies, moral 
and material, is certainly beyond the scope of man's 
discretionary rights, and probably will not be 
adopted by Divine Providence until the opportunity 
of milder reformation shall have been offered us 
again and again, through a series of future ages. — 
Hawthorne. 

The cross is God's never-to-be-broken pledge, 
that the resources of infinite love are employed to 
undo the work of evil, and establish justice and 



DIVINE LOVE. "71 

truth among men. By that sign Human Faith 
mounts the chariot of conflict, of conquest, and of 
victory. Lcve is stronger than hate, and will win 
its way to every citadel of iniquity and prostrate it 
in the dust. This is the unwritten and therefore 
ineffaceable creed that keeps heart and hope in the 
bosom of humanity. — Porter. 

6 Is not this a scandal when Lazarus is lying at 
the doors, and Dives is out in his carriage every 
day in the parks ? Every man and woman who is 
a Christian has been sitting not once, but all his 
life at the table of God's love, feeding his intelli- 
gence, tastes, his immortal spirit. Let him care for 
those who are wandering in wretchedm 

In every missionary held there is need not only 
of the most elevated piety, rut of rt force 

of intellect and the ripest fruits ol ft h ip. Go 

where you will, it would be difficult to find such 
a company of men as Goodell, SchaufBer, 1> wight, 
Hamlin, and Everett. Thev are whole-souled men 
and rejoice in their work with exceeding great joy. — 
Stoddard. 

The best educated people and best bred people, 
other things being equal, are best qualified for use- 
fulness in this enterprise (at Hilton Head). 

One of Gen. Mitchell's first efforts was to build 
them houses to live in: and the new, clean tene- 
ments at nilton Head, looming up like a young, 
western village, are a monument to-day of his 



72 MITCHELL. 

promptness and energy : — trivial monuments to the 
naked eye, bright and enduring to the thinking 
heart. They are but the shadowy forerunners of 
days to come, even as the first log huts of the 
pioneer shrine the possibilities of great states that 
lie waiting but to spring into life and grandeur. 

Science loses a bright star from its zenith — society 
a brilliant member from its circles — humanity a 
warm and tried friend; while Philanthropy may 
w^ell veil her face and weep, as for a son dutiful and 
loyal. 

Mr. Beecher said : — A few had fallen, and among 
them Mitchell, who died at his post with his armor 
on : and fortunate, thrice fortunate was it that the 
door of heaven opened to him, not among the stars 
where he loved to wander, but among Christ's poor 
and helpless disciples, whom he was beginning to 
teach, inspire, instruct, defend. It might kindle 
the imagination more if he had departed while 
keeping nightly watch upon those glorious orbs, 
passing as from glory to glory. But nobler, more 
sublime was his going, who all the way from the 
sepulchre to the throne of God, heard airy voices 
saying, — < Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one ol 
the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto 
me.' Rest ! Thy sun arose, but forgot to set : it 
went not down, but from very noon arose higher 
into the unhorizoned heaven. 

12. Secretary Stanton asked the Savannah blacks 



LIBERTY. 73 

in the name of the Repuoiic — f What do you want 
for your people ? ' 

What shall one then ansicer the messengers of the 
nation? That the Lord hath founded Zion and the 
poor of his people shall trust in it. 

' The nation has, during the past year, made 
palpable progress toward a recognition of the great 
truth, that a wrong done to the humblest and most 
despised, is an injury and grievance to all : and 
that Liberty can be perfect for none, until there are 
Liberty and Justice for all.' 

• Our government is a sun in the firmament of 
political freedom, which is destined to be the centre 
of an extended and glorious system. Whatever 
threatens to make that sun go out in darkness, 
threatens the myriads that are to live in its light, 
with the gloom of a night whose succeeding morning 
no man can foretell. — New Exglander. 

15. Moreover all the chief of the priests and the 
p>eop)le transgressed very much after all the abomina- 
tions of the heathen, and polluted the House of the 
Lord, which he had hallowed in Jerusalem. 

And you shall see young people at the Lord's 
table on the Sabbath* day, and, before the week is 
out, whirling in these indecent dances as freely as 
any worldling of them all. Is it right ? Can it be 
right ? < But they like it.' Like it, do they ? I 
have no doubt the children of Israel liked the 
Golden Calf, but Moses ground it to powder. Mis- 



74 A HEATHENISH CUSTOM. 

chiefs come in insidiously ; they may need to be 
thrust out at the point of the bayonet. . ' . ' But 
then/ say some, ' we may as well give up society/ 
It may be. There are various forms of self-denial, 
and precious little of it among some disciples in 
these days. Perhaps our Lord meant them when he 
talked ot self-denial. Also when He said, ' He that 
forsaketh not all that he hath, cannot be disciple. 5 
We in the west are beginning to think that some- 
thing must be done to save the country. Something 
definite and positive. Once, long ago, they went 
and searched for the ' accursed thing.' We do 
not pretend that we have found the accursed thing. 
But all reforms must enter into particulars, and take 
up one thing at a time. Mere general exhortation 
does not touch anybody or anything. 

Is there any line between the church and the 
world ? — Oxest. 

Thus have ye said, house of Israel, for I knou) 
the things that come into your minds every one of 
them. And that ivhich cometh into your mind shall 
not be at all that ye say. We ivill be as the Heathen. 
Sanctify noiv yourselves, and sanctify the house of 
the Lord God of your fathers, and carry forth the 
filthiness out of the holy place. 

Your true life lies in the realm of noble thought, 
of divine purposes, of holy perseverance ; in generous 
self-denial, and self-abnegation. — Beecher. 

Lord Byron writes : — I date my first impressions 



BROKEN COVENANTS. 75 

against religion from having witnessed how little its 
votaries yyere actuated by true Christian charity. 

' 21. The Provencal historian affirms that the final 
truce between Richard and Saladin was concluded 
in a fair, flowery meadow .near Mouirt Tabor, when 
Richard was so much charmed with the gallant 
bearing of the Prince of Miscreants — as Saladin is 
civilly termed in the crusading treaties — that he 
declared he would rather be the friend of that brave 
and honest pagan than the ally of the crafty Philip 
or the brutal Leopold. — Miss Strickland. 

6 Jesus, are these Thy Christians ? ' cried the 
Mahometan prince, when the Christians broke their 
league with him ? 

Wherefore, thus saith the Lord, As I live, surely 
mine oath which he has despised, and my covenant 
that he hath broken, even it will I recompense upon 
his own head. 

* The sacrifices I require, 

Are hearts which love and zeal inspire, 

And vows with strictest care made good/ 

Within ye are full of hypocrisy. 

' Christ did not adroitly wind through the various 
forms of evil, meeting it with expedient silence. 
The forces of righteousness must upheave the im- 
moral elements before it can settle them on its own 
sure foundations.' 

80. Travel in Europe shows an American droll 
things, and some of the drollest among his own 
country people. I never could understand why 



76 PRETTY THINGS. 

many men from the other side of the sea came 
abroad, since they bring only their bodies with 
them, leaving their minds in their absorbing business 
at home. Many women, I have recently discovered, 
visit Europe mainly for the purpose of extending 
their shopping expeditions. . . I have heard hus- 
bands and fathers groaning over their tribulations. 
In their excess of agony, knowing that I was yet 
spared, as they put it, they confided to me how, 
since they had set foot on European soil, they had 
been nothing more than express agents, forwarding 
parcels and boxes filled with their wives and 
daughters' purchases 

Anxious to defend woman from all aspersions, 
whether just or unjust, I have intimated to the 
complainers that perhaps their conversation was not 
agreeable, and that the fair shoppers were willing 
to appear more devoted to J ~ t form of feminine 
rights than they really were. 

The men stoutly denied this, and they were ngnt 
in their denial. 

In the cars and on boats I have heard women 
who talked of nothing but the best places to buy 
things. Italy was not the region of natural beauty 
and the home of art. It was the land where 
cameos, corals, and mosaics could be purchased to 
advantage. Holland had no associations, but it had 
beautiful linens. Switzerland was Alpless, but the 
wood carvings were very pretty. Belgium had no 



PRETTY THINGS. 77 

history, no school of art, no Rembrants, no Gerard 
Dows, no Paul Potters ; but it wove laces in whose 
fine meshes a woman's soul might well be lost. — 
Browne. 

I heard, and they spake not aright. 

Women rule over them. — Women love pretty 
things, and make men waste life in getting pretty 
things. — Felix Holt. 

The Lord will take away the bravery of their 
tinkling ornaments, chains and bracelets. 

Women of intellect take to the belles lettres rather 
than to science, and the most of reading women 
delight their emotional nature with sensational 
novels. — Patterson. 

There is no real criticisnl in Mrs. Montagu's 
essay on Shakspeare ; none showing the beauty of 
thought as founded on the workings of the human 
heart. — Johnson. 

4 Women whose chief concern it is to dress accord- 
ing to fashion are not likely to interfere with the 
graver concerns of life. Health and decorum are 
sacrificed in modern drawing-rooms — Heaven only 
knows why — to the Moloch, Fashion.' 

The vail is upon their heart,— when it shall turn 
to the Lord the vail shall be taken away. Seeing 
then that we have such hope we use great plainness 
of speech. 

1. A perfect woman — nobly planDed 

To warn, to comfort, and command. 



78 THE TRUE WOMAN. * 

She openeth her mouth with wisdom, and in her 
tongue is the law of kindness. She looketh well to 
the ways of her household and eateth not the bread of 
idleness. 

What does cookery mean ? It means the know- 
ledge of Medea, and of Circe, and of Calypso, and 
of Helen, and of Rebekah, and of the Queen of 
Sheba. It means the knowledge of all fruits, and 
herbs, anl balms, and a knowledge of all that is 
healing, and sweet in fields, and groves, and savory 
in meats ; it means carefulness, and inventiveness, 
and watchfulness, and willingness, and readiness of 
appliance. It means the economy of your great 
grandmothers, and the science of modern chemists ; 
it means much tasting, and no wasting; it means 
English thoroughness and French art, and Arabian 
hospitality, and it means in fine that you are to be 
perfectly and always ' ladies, loaf givers.' — Tribune. 

' Would that you ladies would say, Is not every 
child on earth in a real, in a spiritual sense, my own 
child, for it is my sister's child ? She may not do 
her duty to it. Shall I not do it for her ? Be a 
lady, and do such things as these. Let no lady 
neglect to do so.' 

2. Love of Nature. 

' A heart open to the whole noon of nature, and 
through all its brightness drinking in the smile ot 
a present God.' 



ELIZABETH. 79 

Eugenie De Gruerin's Journal. — In its pages the 
sacredness of the inner life is preserved in all its 
fragile beauty. She had learned to distinguish what 
fed the deep springs of her being from the storms 
and cloud-shadows that touched but the surface, 
hence the book is almost destitute of those outward 
e very-day events which merely occupy or perplex, 
and is filled with thoughts of God, the wants and 
destiny of our natures, sentiments of friendship, 
and raptures over the beauty which, to her watch- 
ful, reverent eye existed even in the solitudes of 
i La Cayla.' ' Every page of the book is hallowed 
and individualized by the light of faith. It was this 
that gave vitality to every moment, earnestness to 
every action. It was faith which extracted from 
prayer that rapture whose utterance trembles in 
golden silence. To this celestial eye nature was 
transparent, and literature glowed beneath it with a 
light that not only informed but exalted.' 

3. AVe had intended to say something of that illus- 
trious group of which Elizabeth is the central 
figure — the dextrous Walsingham, the impetuous 
Oxford, the elegant Sackville, the all-accomplished 
Sidney; concerning Essex, the ornament of the 
court and of the camp, the model of chivalry, the 
munificent patron of genius, whose great virtues, 
great courage, great talents, the favor of his 
sovereign, the love of his countrymen — all that 
seemed to insure a happy and glorious life — led to 



80 THE HUMAN MOULD. 

an early and ignominious death ; concerning Raleigh, 
the soldier, the sailor, the scholar, the courtier, the 
orator, the poet, the historian, the philosopher. . . 

We had intended also to say something concerning 
the literature of that splendid period,' and especially 
concerning those two incomparable men, the Prince 
of Poets and the Prince of Philosophers, who have 
made the Elizabethan age a more glorious and 
important era in the history of the human mind 
than the age of Pericles, of Augustus, or of Leo. — 
Macaulay. 

* * On such occasions the littleness 'of Elizabeth's 
character entirely disappeared, and the imperial 
majesty of her noble nature possessed her wholly. — 
Fhoude. 

Alas ! the human mould's at fault ■ 

And still by turns it claims 
A nobleness that can exalt, 

A littleness that shames. — Swain. 

O Eve, in evil hour thou dids't give ear 
To that false worm ! — Milton. 

10. ' Minds made giddy by a reckless pursuit of 
pleasure, or repressed into the narrow routine of 
mere money-getting for money's sake, need to be 
roused and educated to higher views and desires. 
It would be a slow work to bring all ranks from the 
very lowest up to the highest of philosophic culture, 
where familiar with what great men in all ages have 
taught they shall really pause, and reflect, and 
search out wisdom. Perhaps the- best that can be 



THE HUMAN MOtJLD. 81 

hoped in this way is, that as the years go on a 
larger and larger number shall reach this lofty 
stand-point, so as gradually to raise the tone of 
popular belief and conduct.' 

It may be easy to prove to the simplest mind that 
virtue is the best policy, but it is not as easy to 
secure that clear judgment "which reaches right 
decisions, and makes one strong against the plausible 
gloss of evil influence. But while bad men, or weak, 
blind women are liable to gain the ascendancy, they 
can give in a single month all the improvements 
that the wisdom of ages has accumulated to the 
destroying hand of an uneducated rabble. The 
world of progress has been wiped out again and 
again by the bubbling over of the waters of a reck- 
less mob from the ditches and sewers which no one 
had cared to cleanse. And the world will always 
be in danger of such a deluge as long as we do not 
look more closely to the springs of human action. — 
Mrs. Arey. 

^Ye owe it to posterity not to suffer their dearest 
inheritance to be destroyed. But, if it were possible 
for us to be insensible of these sacred claims, there 
is yet an obligation binding upon ourselves from 
which nothing can acquit us : a personal interest 
which we cannot surrender. To alienate even our 
own rights would be a crime as much more enor- 
mous than suicide, as a life of civil security and 
freedom is superior to a bare existence : and if life 



82 LINCOLN. 

be the bounty of Heaven we scornfully reject the 
noblest part of the gift if we consent to surrender 
that certain rule of living, without which the condi- 
tion of human nature is not only miserable but 
contemptible.— Junius' Letters. 

Since the day that your fathers came forth out of 
the land of Egypt unto this day I have even sent 
unto you all my servants, the prophets, daily rising 
up early and sending them. Yet they hearkened not 
unto me, nor inclined their ear, but hardened their 
neck : they did worse than their fathers. 

4 Human nature is so blinded by her own inde- 
pendence and self-confidence that when she is 
interested it is impossible for the mind to disarm 
her of her predilections.' 

None of the lepers but Naaman the Syrian 
cleansed. 

Man is born like a wild ass' colt, and it is only 
by a long training in trials and afflictions that he 
is brought to submission or obedience. — Beecher. 

14. How mean a thing were man if there were not 
that within him which is higher than himself — if he 
could not master the illusions of sense and discern 
the connections of events by a superior light which 
comes from God ! He so shares the divine impulses, 
that he has power to subject interested passions to 
love of country, and personal ambition to' the en- 
noblement of man. Not in vain has Lincoln lived, 
for he has helped to make this Republic an example 



president Lincoln's last reception. 83 

of justice with no caste but the caste of humanity. 
The last day of his life beamed with sunshine, as he 
sent his friendly greeting to the men of the Rocky 
Mountains, and the Pacific slope ; as he contempla- 
ted the return of hundreds of thousands of soldiers 
to fruitful industry ; as he welcomed in advance hun- 
dreds of thousands of emigrants from Europe, as his 
eye kindled with enthusiasm at the coming wealth 
of the nations. And so with these thoughts for his 
country, he was removed from the toils and tempta- 
tions of his life and was at peace. — Bancroft. 

—At first the strange, cold, ashen look disap- 
pointed me. But gradually much of the old expres- 
sion came back to that marked head, to those features, 
so individual, so powerful, and so manly. You 
missed the dark, soft, benignant eyes ; but God's 
peace, not man's violence, seemed to have ^pressed 
down the weary lids into welcome rest. There was 
a cloak of patient serenity and forgivingness about 
the face most touching and peculiar. The hands 
seemed to have dropped into just such a tired posi- 
tion that I had seen them fall into in brief intervals of 
weary hand-shaking. Yet he seemed to be graciously 
receiving us all, though so mutely, and with no token 
of welcome. As I gazed around on that old Hall 
(Philadelphia) consecrated to freedom by one of the 
grandest events in our national history, I felt that 
the scene had other witnesses than we, than those 
armed watchers, than the passing multitude — the im- 



84 LINCOLN. 

mortal shades of heroes and patriots — the great, tried 
souls of the young Republic, in whose ways he had 
fearlessly walked, into whose fellowship he had been 
received. — Grace Greenwood. 

In common with most people I had concluded that 
the presidential honor came to Mr. Lincoln without 
paving. When the Douglas and Lincoln contest was 
ended, the defeated man said to his partner : ' Billy 
I knew that I should miss the place when I competed 
for it. This defeat will make me President. He re- 
fused, in the interim, any proposition looking to the 
acceptance of any lesser office, and with the concur- 
rence of his friends and family. At the same time 
he took no pains to precipitate his opportunity ; 
rather like a man destined, sat more closely to study 
and vigilance. Read all the issues as they developed, 
and waited for his call. It came at last in a special 
invitation to speak at Cooper Institute. He felt in- 
tuitively that this was the Rubicon, and with a human 
thrill, paused and hesitated. The best lawyer in his 
state, the hero of a debate equivalent to a senator- 
ship, with a mind too broad and grave for a mere 
gubernatorial place, and already by four years destiny 
and ' prepraation President of the United States, he 
went up to the post with a dignity and ease that 
made men stare, because they had not seen the steps 
he took upon the road. — Speaking thus among the 
associations of his working life, the years of Abra- 
ham Lincoln began to return in the vividness of their 



LINCOLN. 85 

monotony bleak and unreinunerated, hard and prac- 
tical, full of patient walk down a road without a 
turning; brightened by dutifulness alone, pointed, 
but not cheered by wayside anecdote, and successful, 
not so much because he was sanguine himself, as 
because he rated not eminence and honor too high, 
or too difficult. When he found himself competing 
for the senatorship with the quickest, the least scrupu- 
lous, and the most flattered orator in the Union, he 
saw nothing odd or dramatic about it. His presiden- 
tial opportunity, surprised everybody but himself ; not 
that he had self-conceit, but that he thought the 
office possible. — He never made a bid for the favor or 
forgiveness of history, but ruled the nation as if it 
were practicing law, and practiced law as if it were 
ruling the nation. This real greatness of mind, ob- 
liviousness of circumstances, ascending from a prac- 
tice of $3,000 a year to 825,000 as if there were no 
contrast between them, giving Billy the permission 
to use the firm style as before, without a conscious 
poetic trait, yet even in absent moments looking very 
long away, pondering the distance of rewards, promi- 
ses, vindications with a longing that was poetry. — 
Townshend. 

He is an able man. Through all his. plain and 
homely simplicity appears a sagacity that grapples 
on equal terms with the mightiest intellects, and 
moves on undismayed to the consummation of the 
most momentous events ot any age. Leather needs a 



86 GREATNESS. 

polish. Baubles require a setting. But the true dia- 
mond needs none. If Mr. Lincoln were polished, 
we might doubt whether his polish had not imposed 
him upon us for more than he is really worth. If he 
were an aristocrat, we had not mistaken his assump- 
tion for ability. — Tribune cor. 

/ have raised him up in righteousness, and I will 
direct all his ways : he shall build my city, and he 
shall let go my captives, not for price nor reward. 

' God takes time, seldom begins and finishes a work 
by the same agent, or in the same generation. One 
sows and another reaps. He employs a succession 
till it draws near its consummation, then he raises up 
some controlling spirit who finishes the work.' 

We don't know who our angels are ; we know not 
what has been ours till we weep for what we have 
lost. While he lived nobody suspected Mr. Lincoln 
of being a great man. We did not even know how 
we loved l}im, till he died and crape floated from 
every door. Where now in high places can we find 
a man so simply grand ? Where one who could be 
trusted to use limitless power as he did, without 
thought of himself? ' If I am God's instrument, 
He will never forsake the thing that he uses, but it 
must accomplish his purpose,' I once heard him say 
in the hey-day of his power, with a humility and 
sadness never to be forgotten. 

What is greatness ? It is not intellect alone. It 
is not moral and emotional quality only. It is a 



THE SABBATH. 87 

character compounded of both. It is wisdom, it is 
high thought; it is wide vision. It is magnanimity, 
it is mercy ; it is love ; it is gentleness and child- 
heartedness ; it is supremacy to all littleness. — M. c. a. 

To sit in courts 01 high debate, 
And found the statutes of the state 

Upon the testament of God. 
Then, after Love controls the lands — 

At last — to enter worlds unseen, 
For earth beneath in order stands : 

Ages will keep his memory green. 

— YVlLLARD. 

18. Speak ye also unto the children of Israel, say- 
ing, Verily my Sabbaths ye shall keep : for it is a 
sign between me and you throughout your generations ; 
that ye may knoiv that I am the Lord that doth sane- 
tify you. 

Two inestimable advantages Christianity lias given 
us: first, the Sabbath, the jubilee of the whole 
world ! whose light dawns welcome alike into the 
closet of the philosopher, into the garret of toil, 
and into prison cells ; and everywhere suggests even 
to the vile, the dignity of spiritual being. And 
secondly, the institution of preaching. — the speech 
of man to men. . . What hinders that now every- 
where, in pulpits, in lecture-rooms, in houses, in 
fields, wherever the invitation of men, or your own 
occasions lead you, you speak the very truth as your 
life and conscience reach it, and cheer the waiting, 



88 THE SABBATH. 

fainting hearts of men with new hope and new reve- 
lation? Yourself a new-born bard of the Holy 
Ghost. Cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint 
men at first hand with Deity. Look to it, first and 
only, that fashion, custom, authority, pleasure and 
money are nothing to you, — are not bandages over 
your eyes, that you cannot see — but live with the 
privilege of the immeasurable mind. — Emerson. 

Not as pleasing men, but Grod. 

The subjects of the pulpit have never been varied 
from the day the Holy Spirit visibly descended on the 
first advocates of the Gospel in tongues of fire. 
They have immediate relation to that eternity, the 
idea of which is the living soul of all poetry and art. 
It is the province of the preacher of Christianity to 
develop the connection between this world an 1 the 
next, to watch over the beginning of a course that 
will endure forever, and to trace the broad shadows 
cast from imperishable realities on the shifting 
scenery of earth. — Talfourd. 

It is constantly to remind mankind of what man- 
kind is constantly forgetting; not to supply the de- 
fects of human intelligence, but to fortify the feeble- 
ness of human resolutions ; to recall mankind from 
the by-paths where they turn, into the path of salva- 
tion which all know, but few tread. — Sydney Smith. 

' It should be warm, a living altar-coal to melt the 
icy heart and charm the soul.' 

' It is in the sacred vessels of the temple that the 



PREDESTINATION. 89 

oil of joy is kept, which God's people are to have for 
mourning.' 

24. Being predestinated according to the purpose 
of him who worketh all things after the counsel of His 
awn will. 

Regarded from a human point ol view, the possi- 
bility of apostasy remains still for every regenerate 
man, upon every grade of development, even the 
highest ; that is, the new man may be thrust aside 
by the old ; but just as decidedly we must say, that 
regarded from the Divine point of view, it is impossible 
for the elect of God to be overpowered by sin. 
Were it possible with one, it would be so with all, 
and then God's plans would be dependent on man's 
fidelity. — Olshausex. 

That He might make known the riches of His glory 
on the vessels of mercy. 

As the eyes of the company wandered from one 
piece to another of this rare assemblage, they ob- 
served in one corner of the apartment, the broken 
fragments of a vase, of which enough remained to 
discover that it had been intended to excel every 
other vessel in the room, being embellished with an 
uncommon profusion of ornaments, and emblazoned 
with the richest purple, scarlet and gold, besides 
many softer tints of violet, azure and rose color. 
After gazing sometime on the ruins of this splendid 
vessel, the whole company turned a look of inquiry 
upon the person who attended them, and who was 



90 PREDESTINATION. 

also the conductor of the works ; when he informed 
them that the vase had once promised fair to adorn 
the palace of the king. ' We lately undertook,' said 
he, fc to make two vases of that description, upon 
which it was determined that our utmost skill should 
be exerted, in order to give them the highest possi- 
ble perfection of form, coloring and design . and in- 
deed,' added he, ' this manufactory never produced 
more exquisite specimens of our art. The royal 
vessels had passed much to our satisfaction, through 
every other part of the necessary process, but upon 
being submitted to the trying operation of the last 
fire, one of them only came forth with increased 
beauty, while the other, probably from some flaw in 
its original constitution, was reduced to the fragments 
now before you.' . . Known unto God are all His 
works from the beginning ; so that what He once 
destines to honor can by no means fall short of its 
appointed end. And to prevent all distressing doubts 
on this subject, our Omnipotent Former and Fash- 
ioner hath been graciously pleased to assure us that 
He will be with us in the furnace, upholding, strength- 
ening and carrying us through every refining pro- 
cess, until He has placed us in a state of everlasting 
security. Hence it is said of the great God that His 
work is perfect. But the work of the human potter 
must needs partake of the fallibility of the hand that 
formed it. — Mrs. Sherwood. 

Thy builders have perfected thy beauty. 



A FALL. 91 

Man, when he reaches the bioom of his glorified 
life, will unspeakably excel the angels in glory. His 
superiority lies in his capability of development. 
When the diamond is once disturbed by the ray of a 
burning reflector it is irrecoverably gone ; so are the 
angels once fallen, forever lost, according to the 
doctrine of Scripture. The rose can with difficulty 
be hurt, and even from its root it will send forth new 
life ; so was man rendered capable of entering into 
full spiritual life-fellowship with God through the 
help of his Saviour. — Olshausex. 

Saved: Yet so as by fire. 

To conclude this wretched story, the poor Doctor 
of Divinity, having been robbed of all his money in 
this little airing beyond the limits of propriety, was 
easily persuaded to give up the intended tour, and 
return to his bereaved flock, who, very probably, 
were thereafter conscious of an increased unction 
in his soul-stirring eloquence, without suspecting 
the awful depths into which their pastor had dived 
in quest of it. His voice is now silent. I leave it 
to members of his own profession to decide whether 
it was better for him thus to sin outright, and so be 
let into the miserable secret of what manner of man 
he was, or to have gone through life outwardly 
unspotted, making the first discovery of his latent 
evil at the judgment seat. It has occurred to me 
that his dire calamity, as both he and I regarded it, 
might have been the only method by which precisely 



92 ERRORS. 

such a man as himself, and so situated, could be 
redeemed. He has learned, ere now, how that 
matter stood.— Hawthorne. 

Out, damned spot ! 

Being unprepared, 
Our will became the servant to defect. 

— Macbeth. 

Men fall often from a want of moral richness and 
moral culture into vices which are to the heart what 
vermin are to the soil. — Beecher. 

Men may rise on stepping-stones of their dead 
selves to higher things. — Tennyson. 

Whatever I have seen of the world, or known of 
the history of mankind, teaches me to look on the 
errors of others in sorrow, not in anger. When I 
take the history of but one poor heart that has 
sinned and suffered ; when I represent to myself 
the struggles and temptations through which it has 
passed, the vicissitudes of hope and fear, the pressure 
of want, the desertion of friends, the scorn of a 
world that hath little charity, the desolation of the 
mind's sanctuary, the threatening voices within it, 
health gone, happiness gone, perhaps even hope, 
that remains the longest, gone — I would fain lay the 
soul of my fellow-being in His hand from whom it 
came. — Chalmers. 

1 The miserable have no other medicine, 
But only hope.' 



DIVINE PITY. 93 

25. Yet many a year didst Thou forbear them, 
and testifiedst against them by Thy spirit in Thy 
prophets; yet they would not give ear. Nevertheless, 
for Thy great mercies' sake. Thou didst not utterly 
consume them, for Thou art a gracious and merciful 
God. 

6 All souls are Thine ; the wings of morning bear 
None from that Presence which is everywhere ; 
Nor hell itself can hide, for Thou art there. 
Through sins, perversities of will, 

Through doubt and pain, through guilt, and shame, and ill, 
Thy pitying eye is on Thy creature still, 
And Thou canst make eternal Source and Goa* 
In Thy long years, life's broken circle whole ; 
And change to praise the cry of the lost soul. , 

Who can hear the terrors of the Lord of Hosts 
without being awed into a veneration ? Or who can 
hear the kind and endearing accents of a merciful 
Father and not be softened into love toward Him ? 

— Spectator. 
28. Thou hast made the earth to tremble. 
The pillars of heaven's starry roof, 
Tremble and start at His reproof. 
But, if Thy saints deserve rebuke, 
Thou hast a gentler rod. 

Israel hath cast off the thing that is good: the 
enemy shall pursue him. 

vine of Sibmah! I will weep for thee ivith the 
weeping of Jozer. 

Thus tenderly does God deal with Moabites, 
much more with His own people. — Henry. 



94 • REPROOF. 

' Yea, though his sins should dim each spark of love, 

I measure not my love by his returns ; 

And though the stripes I send to bring him home 

Should serve to drive him farther from my arms, 

Still he is mine, I lured him trom the world ; • 

He has no home, no right but in my love. 

Though earth and hell combined against him rise, j 

I'm bound to rescue him, for we are one/ 

' Here everlasting love displays 

The choicest of her stores.' 

The saddest symptom of degeneracy I find in my 
nature is that base ingratitude of heart which 
renders me so unaffected by Thine astonishing 
compassion. — Mason. 

Want of tenderness, Dr. Johnson always alleged, 
was want of parts, and no less a proof of stupidity 
than depravity. 

Which things the angels desire to look into. 

We bow down to the earth, and study and grovel 
in it, and content ourselves with the outside of the 
unsearchable riches of Christ, and look not within 
it : but they having no desire but for the glory of 
God, being pure flames of fire, burning only with 
love to Him, are no less delighted than amazed 
with the bottomless wonders of His wisdom and 
goodness, shining in the work of our redemption. 
It is our shame and folly that we lose ourselves and 
our thoughts in poor childish things, and trifle away 
our days we know not how, and let these rich 
mysteries lie unregarded. — Leighton. 



MAY DAY. 95 

0, the love of Christ ! the love of Christ ! he (Dr. 
Judson) would suddenly exclaim, while his eye 
kindled, and the tears chased each other down his 
cheeks : we cannot understand it now, but what a 
beautiful theme for eternity ! 

11. The wood I walk in on this mild May day, 
with the yellow brown foliage of the oa&s between 
me and the blue sky, the white star-flowers, and the 
blue-eyed speedwell, and the ground ivy at my feet — 
what grove of tropic palms, what strange ferns, or 
splendid broad-petaled blossoms could ever thrill 
such deep and delicate fibres within me as this 
home scene? These familiar flowers, these well- 
remembered bird notes; this sky, with its fitful 
brightness, these furrowed and grassy fields, each 
with a sort ot personality given to it by the capri- 
cious hedge rows. Such things as these are the 
mother tongue ot our imagination, the language 
that is laden with all the Subtle, inexplicable asso- 
ciations the fleeting hours of our childhood left 
behind them. Our delight in the sunshine on the 
deep-bladed grass to-day might be no more than the 
faint perception of wearied souls if it were not for 
the sunshine and the grass of far-off years which 
still live in us, and transform our perception into 
love. — Mill on the Floss. 

Oft hae I rov'd by bonny Doon, 

To see the rose and woodbine twine, 

And ilka bird sang o' its luve, 

And fondly sae did I o' mine. — Burns. 



96 FORESTS. 

What a noble gift to man are the forests ! The 
winds of heaven seem to linger amid these balmy 
branches, and the sunshine falls like a blessing upon 
the green leaves ; the wild breath of the forest, 
fragrant with bark and berry, fans the brow with 
grateful freshness, and the beautiful wood-light, 
neither garish nor gloomy, full of calm and peaceful 
influences, sheds repose over the spirit. Every 
object here has a deeper merit than our wonder can 
fathom ; each has a beauty beyond our full per- 
ception. — Miss Cooper. 

As to the town itself, I do not know whether I 
told you how much I nauseate it, but no length of 
time will ever cure my loathing of it. But sweet 
Nature ! I have conversed with her with inexpres- 
sible luxury. A flower, a bird, a tree, a fly, has 
been enough to kindle a delightful train of ideas 
and emotions, and sometimes to elevate the mind 
to sublime conceptions. — Foster. 

A little last year's nest 

Hangs gray and bare on yonder tree : 
No play of wind-tossed branches, drest 

In blossom, hides the sight from me. 

Where are its hopes insphered in pearl — 

Its downy life, so frail and fair ? 
Love's welcome note — the hasty swirl 

Of mother-pinions through the air ? 

toor nest ! deserted, desolate, 
The minister of deeds out grown : 



ANALOGIES. 97 

Some subtle kinship with thy fate, 
The weary human heart may own ! 

Yet, stay ! with short and sudden flight, 
Swift sidelong glance and any rest, 

A bird, amid the blossoms white, 
Alights beside the empty nest. 

Her heart on building cares intent, 

With bright, quick-eyed and dextrous bill, 

She gathers from the hoard unspent 
Materials for her loving skill. 

In some far nook, concealed from view, 
Leaf-Guarded from the noon-dav glare, 

The old nest, woven witn the new, 

Shall serve life's purpose, fresh and fair. 

I take the lesson to my heart, 

Sweet symbol of a truth divine : 
Labor and love have larger part 

Than present use in man's design. 

Each fearless word, each lifted cross ' 

Shall be the future's heritage ; 
Transition is not rest or loss : 

True deeds pass on from age to age. 

— Miss Humphrey. 

i The crickets sing a song of hope fulfilled, and 
though in that glad music there be neither speech 
nor language which we can recognize as such, there 
is yet a voice to be heard among them by all who 
love to listen with reverent delight to the sweet 
harmonies and deep analogies of nature.' - 
5 



98 BERLIN. 

The providence that's in a watchful state 
Knows almost every grain of Plutus' gold, 
Finds bottom in th' uncomprehensive deeps, 
Keeps pace with thought, and almost like the gods, ' 
Does thoughts unveil in their dumb cradles. 

— Shaks. 

And made him friends of mountains ; with the stars 

And the quick spirit of the Universe 

He held his dialogues ; and they did teach 

To him the magic of their mysteries : 

To him the book of night was opened wide. 

And voices from the deep abyss revealed 

A marvel and a secret.— Byron. 

22. This is a dreadful state of things that is de- 
clared by Dr. Schwabe, president of the statistical 
board at Berlin, to exist in that intelligent city. 
Children, he says, though much improved by public 
instruction, ' are strangely deficient in the knowledge 
of Nature and natural- phenomena. From about 
1,000 children examined before being admitted into 
school, 777 never saw any rainbow, 633 a field of 
potatoes, 602 a butterfly, 583 the sunset, 462 the 
rising of the sun, 460 a meadow, 406 a corn field, 
387 a flock of sheep,- 364 a forest, 264 an oak tree, 
and, lastly, 167 had never heard the song of the lark.' 
No wonder this statement made, as is reported, ' a 
great sensation.' What prospect of a happy or use- 
ful life to children brought up amid all the advantages 
of a great city, and yet ignorant of so simple things 



NATURE. 99 

as ' corn fields,' and ( flocks of sheep,' and ' the song 
of the lark,' and all the rest. — Independent. 

The whole force of education, until very lately, has 
been directed in every possible way to the destruction 
of the love of nature. The only knowledge which 
has been considered essential among us, is that of 
words, and the next after it, of the abstract sciences ; 
while every liking shown by children for simple, 
natural history, has been either violently checked (if 
it took an inconvenient form for the house maid), or 
else scrupulously limited to hours of play ; so that 
those who can thus use their eyes and fingers are 
for the most part neglected or rebellious lads, while 
your well-behaved and amiable scholars are disci- 
plined into blindness and palsy ot half their faculties. 
Herein there is a notable ground ot difterence be- 
tween the lovers of nature and its despisers. We 
shall find that the love of nature has been a faithful 
and sacred element of human feeling — that is to say, 
supposing all circumstances otherwise the same with 
respect to two individuals ; the one who loves nature 
most, will be ahvai/siound to have more faith in Grod 
than the other. It is intensely difficult, owing to 
the confusing and counter influences which always 
mingle in the data of the problem to make this ab- 
straction fairly ; but so far as we can do it, so far, I 
boldly assert, the result is constantly the same ; the 
nature-worship will be found to bring with it such a 
sense of the presence and power of a Great Spirit as 



IOC NATURE. 

no mere reasoning can either induce or controvert ; 
and where that nature- worship is innocently pursued 
— L <?., with due respect to other claims on time, 
feeling, and exertion, and associated with the higher 
principles of religion, — it becomes the channel of 
certain sacred truths, which by no other means can 
be conveyed. The greater number of the words 
which are recorded in Scripture, as directly spoken 
to men by the lips of the Deity, are either simple 
revelations of His law or special threatenings, com- 
mands and promises relating to special events. But 
two passages of God's speaking, one in the Old and 
one in the New Testament, possess, it seems to me, a 
different character from any of the rest having been 
uttered ; the one to effect the last necessary change 
in the mind of a man whose piety was in other re- 
spects perfect ; and the other, as the first statement 
to all men of the principles of Christianity by Christ 
himself. — I mean the '38th to 41st chapters of the 
book of Job, and the Sermon on the Mount. Now, 
the first of these passages is from beginning to end 
nothing else than a direction of the mind to the 
works of God in nature. And the other consists only 
in the inculcation of three things : first, right con- 
duct ; second, looking for eternal life ; third, trusting 
God, through watchfulness of His dealings with His 
creation. As tar as I can judge of the ways of men, 
it seems to me that the simplest and most necessary 
truths are always the last believed ; and I suppose 



EDUCATION, 101 

that well-meaning people in general would rather 
regulate their conduct and creed by almost any other 
portion of Scripture whatsoever, than by that Ser- 
mon on the Mount. — Ruskin. 

1. Take this child away and nurse it for me and 1 
will give thee thy wages. — Certainly 1 will be with 
thee. 

A cruel adversary intends the destruction of them 
all. Nature frames for them an ark of bulrushes, 
and leaves them to waves and winds, and monsters 
prowling for what they may destroy. Temptations 
will assail them. Troubles will overtake them. 
Death will claim them. You have to fortify them 
against vice and tribulation. You have to qualify 
them, if your education of them is adapted to their 
condition in this world, not only to live but also to 
die. Picture to yourselves the ministering spirits 
clothing them with the ' white robes,' placing upon 
their heads the crowns of glory, and putting into 
their hands the golden harps on which they are to 
strike before the throne the strains of celestial glad- 
ness. The everlasting Father seals their investiture, 
and bids them follow the Lamb whithersoever He 
goeth. I say unto you that He will in some shape 
or other give you your reward. — Dehon. 

As for me this is my covenant with them, saith the 
Lord. My spirit that is upon thee, and my tvords 
which I have put in thy mouth shall not depart out of 



102 EDUCATION. 

the mouth of thy seed and out of the mouth of thy 
seed's seed from henceforth and forever. 

It is our business to do all the preparatory work — 
to perform all that human agency allied to divine 
power can accomplish, and then, with a sublime and 
cheerful faith, to leave to God the developing process. 
We may not take you into the dark room of His pur- 
poses and counsels and providences ; but it is His 
work to develop and impress His own image upon the 
heart you have so oatiently trained and cultivated, 
and in His owe good time the work shall be done — 
Wendell. 

lor precept must he upon precept, precept upon 
precept. 

We are all envious naturally, but by checking envy 
we get the oetter of it. So We are all thieves 
naturally : a child always tries to get what it wants 
the nearest way. By good instruction and good 
habits this is cured < till a man has not even an in- 
clination to seize what is a lothers ; has no struggle 
with himsell about it. — Johnson. 

The disposition to hate evil is one of the benefits 
of the old catechetical instructions. A man that 
follows his impulses gams in some respects, but if 
those impulses are not directed and regulated by 
definite doctrinal and ethical views and by definite 
conventional usages, their spontaneity tends to vague- 
ness, and to a condition in which all qualities mingle 



EDUCATION. 103 

and form a mixture, the individual elements of which 
are all lost.' 

More precious than fine gold. 

Yesterday, I took my leave of J. t put him on 
hoard his boat, and he and I parted with words and 
thoughts too deep for tears, as "Wordsworth wrote. 
God bless him ! If I were a beggar on a dung hill, 
it ought to be riches to me to have such a son. He 
is pious, without an ounce of affectation, a genuine 
child of God's own sonsbip. He has very good 
abilities, good health, good habits, cool judgment, 
calculation, forethought, with an amount of fearless- 
ness which surprises. He is laborious, modest, self- 
denying, conscientious to the last scruple. Dear fel- 
low! he loves you all with the sincerest love, and I 
came back to my club, feeling that I had parted with 
a treasure. God is with him. — IIavelock. 

We brought nothing into this world. 

' In the Science of Life we must all begin for 
ourselves where our great-grandparents began. Just 
as morning will bring with it the same sequence of 
morning, noon, and night that dawned, and flamed, 
and faded in Eden.' 

6 What, you may ask, should be the moral educa- 
tion you ought to give your sons ? My answer is, 
that you would not comprehend it if you have not 
yourself experienced its routine. Acquire and you 
will then be enabled to confer it ? ' 



104 EDUCATION. 

Man was meant to grow up amidst nature, and all 
the activities of human society. His senses- were 
meant to be avenues through which the Divine order 
and beauty of the material world were to be opened 
to his inner being, to stir into sympathy and life a 
corresponding spiritual order and beauty there. It 
was meant that he should grow up under the influ- 
ences of home and society, — under a mother's love 
and father's wisdom, and amidst the kind deeds of 
brothers, sisters, friends: and so through all this 
finite love and wisdom rise to the worship of the 
Infinite Heart, and the Absolute Wisdom. It was 
meant that he should grow up in this adventurous 
school of human society, with its varied enterprises, 
contests, and experiences ; be put at the risk of 
limb and life, and come, under the captaincy of 
conscience, into conflict with error, ignorance, and 
wrong, and grapple with them : and so by struggle 
and victory rise to the comprehension of the supreme 
power there is in the Absolute Truth and Integrity, 
that are the elements of the universe. As our 
physical capacities and instincts appear — some 
earlier, some later, just when occasion calls for 
them — so these higher spiritual capacities and in- 
stincts unfold themselves just when and where the 
need for them appears. God does not burden us 
with knowledge before we have a use. for it, but by 
a beautiful law, the very need when it comes touches 
some hidden spring, and lo, the curtain is drawn 



EDUCATION. 105 

aside, and the very truth we want stands there 
revealed. No sooner, for instance, is a child capable 
of going wrong, than his inward vision is opened 
to the superior loveliness of the right, and his sense 
of moral obligation vitalized to l;ind him to the 
better course. And thus it is through the whole 
course of life. At every need, at every emergency, 
at every cry of the heart, God reveals himself just 
so far as the occasion demands, and his child can 
comprehend and profit. — Potter. 

1 Each filial cry shall find a Father near, — 
A faithful friend to love, to bless, to save' 

We must break away the blackened ligatures that 
bind the cramped spirit; we must stir the tremulous 
threads of feeling into life : we must place them 
where the airs are like the airs of home to them ; 
where the murmur of pure fountains will teach them 
faith and trust in God and in humanity, and the 
heart of the child will blossom like the silver lilies, 
whose every glimpse is beauty, and every motion a 
delight. — Mrs. Arey. 

Culture cannot begin too early. In talking with 
scholars, I observe that they lost on ruder compan- 
ions those years of boyhood which alone could give 
imaginative literature a religious quality in their 
esteem. 

The secret of culture is to learn that a few great 
points steadily reappear, alike in the poverty of the 



106 GRUMBLERS. 

obscurest farm and in the miscellany of metropolitan 
life, and that these few alone are to be regarded : — 
the escape from all false ties, courage to be what we 
are,' and love of what is simple and beautiful ; 
independence and cheerful relation: these are the 
essentials — these and the wish to serve — to add 
somewhat to the well-being of man. — Emerson. 

In the midst of a lesson his cold and calm voice 
would fall upon me in the midst 01 a demonstration. 
' No ! ' I hesitated, stopped, and then went back to 
the beginning, and on reaching the same spot, ' No ! ' 
uttered with the tone of perfect conviction, barred 
my progress. ' The next ! ' and I sat down in red 
confusion. He, too, was stopped with ' No ! ' but 
went right on, finished, and, as he sat down was 
rewarded with ' Very well.' ' Why,' whimpered I, 
' I recited it just as he did, and you said, No ! ' 
6 Why didn't you say Yes, and stick to it ? It is 
not enough to know your lesson ; you must know 
that you know it. You have learned nothing till 
you are sure. If all the world says No, your 
business is to say Yes, and prove it.' It was tough 
for a green boy, but it seasoned him. — Beecher. 

When they shall be hungry they shall fret. 

It sounds extreme to say that a child should never 
be allowed to express a dislike of anything which 
cannot be helped. 

The race of grumblers would soon die out if all 
children were so trained that never, between the 



DEMEANOR. 107 

ages of five and twelve did they utter a needless 
complaint without being gently reminded that it was 
foolish and disagreeable. — H. H. 

' A constant succession of little contemptible 
worries tends to fasten a querulous, grumbling 
disposition, such as renders a man a nuisance to 
himself, and to those about him. To meet great 
misfortunes we gather up our endurance, and pray 
for Divine support and guidance ; but as for small 
blisters — the insect cares of daily life — we are very 
ready to think that they are too little to trouble the 
Almighty with them, or even to call up our forti- 
tude to face them.' 

13. He that killetli an ox as if he sleiv a man : he 
that sacrificeth a lamb as if he cut off a dog's neck : 
he that offereth an oblation as if he blessed an idol. 

' Inward brutality cannot be disguised even in 
sanctimony ; more offensive and provoking.' 

For if the woman be not covered, let her also be 
shorn; but if it be a shame for a ivoman to be shorn 
or shaven let her be covered. 

4 Outward sign of an inward grace.' Wanting in 
that respect to themselves and others which indi- 
cates a high degree of moral purity and virtue. 

And he made as though he would have gone further. 
But they constrained him, saying, Abide with us. 

Christ was a matchless model of delicacy and true 
reserve. He had the fullness and the majesty of 
those qualities which come from an unsullied divine 



jIW * CHRIST. 

love. It must needs be that He should be invited, 
though He overshadowed them in the stature of His 
being transcendently greater; for that very reason 
he respected their individuality, and the smallest 
heart-rights that belonged to any one of them. And 
when you stand in heaven you will see the amplifi- 
cation of that in God. Not one taste or feeling that 
belongs to you that God will not respect with the 
utmost delicacy, for His greatness is not like ours, 
tumultuous and undiscriminating, but respecting and 
respectful. As soon as Christ saw that they wanted 
Him, then He wanted them. And is not that love 
all the world over ? — reserved and standing upon its 
right and dignity, and maintaining power and con- 
trol over itself, so long as it thinks itself not wanted : 
but the moment it perceives that it is wanted— free, 
iranK, discursive, and overflowing. — Beecher. . 

A man's behavior to his inferiors is the surest 
test ol his breeding. Be pitiful, be courteous, con- 
descend to men of low estate, are maxims of 
Christianity, the justice of which is acknowledged 
by the highest civilization. — Tribune. 

If we know ourselves we shall remember the 
condescension, benignity, and love due to inferiors 
— the affability, friendship, and kindness we ought 
to show to equals — the regard, deference, and honor 
we owe to superiors — and the candor, integrity, and 
benevolence we owe to all. — Mason. 
. Their whole demeanor was easy and natural, with 



DEMEANOR. 109 

that lofty grace and noble frankness which bespeak 
free-born souls that have never been checked in their 
growth by feelings of inferiority. There is a health- 
ful hardiness about real dignity that never dreads 
contact and communion with others, however 
humble. You were only reminded of the difference 
of rank by the habitual respect of the peasant. — 
Irving. 

" The integrity of Diogenes, without his churlish- 
ness, and as his wisdom was useful to him, so it 
rendered him agreeable to the rest of the world. 

The immortal Prince Eugene, who, glorious from 
his courage, and amiable from his clemency, is yet 
less distinguished by his rank than his politeness. 

Want of attention, not want of capacity, that 
leaves us so many brutes. — Chesterfield. 

21. We read of people ' who have the scale of 
your whole nervous system, and can play all the 
gamut of your sensibilities in semi-tones — touching 
the naked nerve pulps as a pianist strikes the keys 
of his instrument.' 'We read that there are as great 
masters of this nerve playing as Vieuxtemps or 
Thalberg in their lines of performance. 

! At that sudden exclamation the child who was 
taking her music lesson paused, with her fingers on 
the piano keys and asked, ' What's the matter Miss 
Macauley ? Did I strike a wrong key ? ' Agnes Ma- 
cauley did not answer. There was a wrong key 
struck elsewhere than on the piano, and she was 



110 NERVE PERFORMERS. 

looking straight at. the visitor in Mrs. John Vincent's 
parlor door. It was a gentleman who came directly 
forward with a smile that wreathed his whole face. 
Agnes Macauley thought involuntarily of Carker in 
6 Dombey and Son/ Carker with his broad smile and 
gleaming teeth. ' This is an unexpected pleasure, 
Miss Macauley,' was the greeting between the shining 
rows of teeth. If he had been Vieuxtemps or 
Thalberg he could not have felt more pleasure at a 
sight of a grand instrument with magnificent com- 
pass and delicacy of tone. Agnes Macauley shivered. 
It w^as the premonitory sign of the delicacy of her 
organization, and then with a command of herself 
that showed her power of will, coolly said, ' How do 
you do, Mr. Bailey ? ' ' I never was better,' answered 
the gentleman. ' My voyage . has quite cured me of 
that old affection of the heart, or lungs, or liver, 
that used to trouble me, and I flatter myself I am a 
perfect picture of health. I see music has its old 
charm for you.' Agnes Macauley made brief de- 
nial. * I see you are devoted to the piano still in 
spite of your indifference,' the gentleman continued, 
as if his first touch had failed to strike the real re- 
sponsive chord. ' Yes,' Agnes Macauley answered 
in a proud, defiant way, i I am devoted to the piano 
as washer-women to their tubs, and seamstresses to 
their needles. They are the tools wherewith we earn 
our daily bread.' The man had struck the right 
chord now. Jerome Bailey had made Agnes Ma- 



NERVE PERFORMERS. Ill 

cauley confess to him that she was a music teacher. 
Jerome Bailey shifted his touch like a musician test- 
ing the compass of an instrument. ' I suppose I will 
find your mother and sisters at the old place ? ' he 
remarked. ' The old place has passed into strangers' 
hands, and my mother and sisters have gone West,' 
Agnes Macauley answered in a voice that suggested a 
moan down deep in the springs of her life. ' Ah,' 
Jerome Bailey exclaimed, as if he were hearing the 
news for the first time. Agnes Macauley knew better. 
She began to pick at the ends of the crimson sash, 
thrown carelessly around her shoulders to protect her 
from the chill of Mrs. John Vincent's grand parlors. 
Jerome Bailey smiled at the movement. If he had 
been Vieuxtemps or Thalberg, he had not smiled 
more at the vibration of the keys after his fingers 
had left them.' — Harper's Weekly. 

Mr. Gladstone is known to be a sensitive man, who 
feels keenly any personal attacks : and small enemies 
naturally delight in teasing with their petty but 
venomous darts, a noble adversary who shows that 
he is galled by every touch. Such men find no profit 
in attacking Bright, who is as imperturbable as ada- 
mant or Ajax : and when he does strike back, always 
crushes his enemy with the supreme calmness of a 
confident strength, which cannot be irritated. There- 
fore, all the resources of malice have been exhausted 
to wound Mr. Gladstone. The utmost recesses of 
his private life have not been held sacred ; his re- 



112 EVIL-SPEAKING. 

ligious faith, his dealings as a citizen, his sources of 
income, everything connected with his character as a 
citizen, his dealings as a citizen, his sources of in- 
come, everything connected with his character as a 
statesman, a husband, a father, and a gentleman, his 
enemies have scrutinized and ransacked to find an 
excuse for calumny. Finding none, they have slan- 
dered without excuse and without shame.' 

' General Scott returned home in 1848 to stand his 
trial before a court-martial on charges preferred 
against him by such creatures as , and to prose- 
cute charges against other officers. His readiness to 
accept affront from the most insignificant persons of 
no sensitiveness to indignities which a more callous 
nature would never have noticed, enabled unworthy 
men in the army and in the government to wound 
him beyond bearing, and to goad him in the extrem- 
ity of his sufferings, to retorts unbecoming his great- 
ness.' 

I am humiliated by the reflection that it is, (or 
was) in the power of such insects to annoy me. — 
Greeley. 

To bear evil-speaking and illiterate judgment with 
equanimity is the highest bravery. It is, in fact, the 
repose of mental courage. 

To persecute the lover of truth, for opposing estab- 
lished customs, and to censure him in after ages for 
not having been more strenuous in opposition, are 
errors which will never cease, until the pleasure of 



HOUSEHOLD SPIES. 113 

self-elevation from the depression of superiority is no 
more. — Montagu. 

Sid me out of the hand of strange children , whose 
mouth is full of vanity. 

These hungry-eyed wretches who set in the un- 
suspicious circle of parents and children, treasuring 
their words, spying their weaknesses, misinterpreting 
the innocent liberties of the household, and then run 
from house to house with their shameless news, are 
worse than poisoners of wells, or burners of houses. 
They poison the faith of man in man. Greedy listen- 
ing is as dishonorable as nimble tattling. The ear 
is the open market where the tongue sells its ill- 
gotten wares. Some there are, who will not repeat 
again what they hear, but they are willing to listen 
to it. They will not trade in contraband goods, but 
they will buy enough for family use ! It is a shame 
to listen to ill of your neighbor. Christian benevo- 
lence demands that you do not love ill news. A 
clean heart and a true honor rejoice in kindly things. 
It should be a pain and sorrow to know of anything 
that degrades your neighbor in your eyes, even if he 
be. your enemy. — Beecher. 

' When the rich carpet is stained, the fool pointeth 
to the stain ; the wise man covers it with his mantle.' 

c Many a wretch has riden on a hurdle who has 
done much less mischief than utterers of forged 
tales, coiners of scandal and clippers of reputation.' 

23. Say not, I will recompense evil. 



114 A STRONG MIND. 

No man can be injured ultimately but by himself. 
Hall. 

No good fame can help, no bad fame can hurt him. 
The Laws are his consolers, the good Laws them- 
selves are alive ; they know if he have kept them. 
Emerson. 

A weak mind would have sunk under sucn a .oa 
of unpopularity. But that resolute spirit seemed to 
derive new firmness from the public hatred. The 
only effect which reproaches appeared to produce on 
him was to sour in some degree his naturally sweet 
temper. — Macaulay. 

With me it is a very small thing that I should be 
judged of you. 

My ears are stone *deaf to this idle buzz, and my 
flesh is as insensible as iron to these petty stings. I 
have an invincible confidence that my poems will co- 
operate with the benign tendencies of human nature 
and society wherever found ; and that they will in 
their degree be efficacious in making men wise, bet- 
ter and happier. — Wordsworth. 

I said to cold neglect and scorn, 

Pass on, I heed you not, 

Ye may pursue me till this form 

And being are forgot. 

But still the spirit which you see, 

Undaunted by your wiles. 

Draws from its own nobility 

Its high-born smiles. 



EUROPE. 115 

July 4.— Europe, the smallest in area of the 
continents, culminates in its centre into the icy 
masses of the Alps. From the glaciers, where all 
the great rivers have their sources, they descend the 
declivities and radiate to the different seas. The 
Danube flows directly east to the Pontic Sea ; the 
Po, to the Adriatic ; the Rhone, to the Sea of 
Lyons ; the Rhine, north to the German Sea. 
Walled off by the Pyrenean and Carpathian 
Mountains, divergent and isolated, are the Tagus, 
the Elbe, and other single rivers, affluents of the 
Baltic, the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the 
Pontic Seas. Descending from common radiant 
points, and diverging every way from one another, 
no intercommunication exists among the rivers of 
Europe toward their sources ; navigation is petty 
and feeble ; art and commerce have never, during 
thirty centuries, united so many small valleys, 
remotely isolated by impenetrable barriers. Hence 
upon each river dwells a distinct people, differing 
from all the rest in race, language, religion, interests 
and habits. Though often politically amalgamated 
by conquest, they again relapse into fragments from 
innate geographical incoherence. .Religious creeds 
and diplomacy form no more enduring bond. The 
history of these nations is a story of perpetual war — 
of mutual extermination; an appalling dramatic 
catalogue of a few splendid tyrannies crushing 
multitudinous millions of submissive and unchron- 



116 ASIA. 

icled serfs. Exactly similar to Europe, though 
grander in size of population, is Asia. From the 
stupendous central barrier of the Himalayas run 
the four great rivers of China, due east, to discharge 
themselves under the rising sun. Toward the south 
run the rivers of Cochin China, the Ganges, and the 
Indus ; toward the. west, the rivers of the Caspian; 
and north, through Siberia to the Arctic Sea, many 
rivers of the first magnitude. During fifty centuries, 
as now, the Alps and Himalaya Mountains have 
proved insuperable barriers to the amalgamation of 
the nations around their bases, and dwelling in the 
valleys that radiate from their slopes. The conti- 
nents of Africa and South America, as far as we are 
familiar with the details of their surfaces, are even 
more than these perplexed into dislocated fragments. 
In contrast, the interior of North America pre- 
sents toward heaven an expanded bcwl, to receive 
and fuse into harmony whatsoever enters within its 
rim. So, each of the other continents presenting a 
bowl reversed, scatter everything from a central 
apex into radiant distraction. Political societies 
and empires have in all ages conformed themselves 
into these emphatic geographical facts. This demo- 
cratic republican empire of North America is then 
predestined to expand and fit itself to the continent ; 
to control the oceans on either hand, and eventually 
the continents beyond them. Much is uncertain, 
yet, through all the vicissitudes of the future, this 



NORTH AMERICA. 117 

much of eternal truth is discernible, in geography 
the antithesis of the old world, in society we are 
and will be the reverse. Our North America will 
rapidly accumulate to a population equaling that of 
the rest of the world combined : a people one and 
indivisible, identical in manners, language, customs, 
and impulses ; preserving the same civilization, the 
same religion ; imbued with the same opinions, and 
having the same political liberties. Of this we have 
two illustrations now under our eye, the one passing 
away, the other advancing. The aboriginal Indian 
race, amongst whom, from Darien to the Esquimaux, 
and from Florida to Vancouver's Island, exists a 
perfect identity in hair, complexion, features, reli- 
gion, stature, and language ; and second, in the 
instinctive fusion into one language and into one 
new race of immigrant Germans, English, Norwe- 
gians, Celts, and Italians, whose individualities are 
obliterated in a single generation. The possession 
of the Basin of the Mississippi, thus held in unity 
by the American people, is a supreme, a crowning 
mercy. Viewed also as the dominating part of the 
great calcareous plain formed of the conterminous 
Basins of the Mississippi, St. Lawrence, Hudson's 
Bay, and Mackenzie, the amphitheatre of the world ; 
here is supremely, indeed, the most magnificent 
dwelling-place marked out by God for man's abode. 
Thus, the perpetuity and destiny of our sacred union 
find their conclusive proof and illustration in the 



118 UNITED STATES. 

bosom of nature. The political storms that periodi- 
cally rage are but the clouds and sunshine that give 
variety to the atmosphere, and checker our history 
as we march. Behold, then, rising now and in the 
future, the empire which industry and self-govern- 
ment create. The growth of half a century, hewed 
out of the wilderness : its weapons, .the axe and 
plow ; its tactics, labor and energy ; its soldiers, 
free and equal citizens. Behold the oracular goal 
to which our eagles inarch, and whither the phalanx 
of our §tates and people moves harmoniously on, to 
plant a hundred states and consummate their civic 
greatness.- — Gilpin. 

10. In exhaustlessness and variety of resources 
no other country on the globe equals ours beyond 
the Mississippi. In grand natural curiosities and 
wonders all other countries combined fall far below 
it. Its mines, forests, and prairies await the 
capitalist. Its dusky races, earth-monuments, and 
ancient cities importune the antiquarian. Its cata- 
racts, canyons, and crests woo the painter. Its 
mountains, minerals, and stupendous vegetable pro- 
ductions challenge the naturalist. Its air invites 
the invalid, healing the system wounded by ruder 
climates. Its society welcomes the immigrant, 
offering high interest upon his investment of money, 
brains or skill ; and, if need be, generous oblivious- 
ness of errors past — a clean page to begin anew the 
record of his life. From the dim confines of Egypt 



EDOMITES 119 

and China, has the spirit of Progress,. like the fabled 
one- of Jewish legend doomed to no respite from his 
wandering, marched on by Greece, Borne, and 
Western Europe, across the Atlantic, through 
Jamestown Harbor, over Plymouth Rock — on, on, 
toward the serene Pacific. Ere long through the 
Golden Gate of San Francisco it will go out*by the 
islands of the sea to that dreamy Orient where it 
was born. And then what ? Four-fifths of all 
civilized nations, past and present, have lived within 
the world-encircling belt between the 30th and 50th 
parallels of north latitude. Our own day shows a 
line of great cities — Baltimore, Cincinnati, St. Louis, 
Chicago, Omaha, Leavenworth, Salt Lake, Virginia, 
Nevada, and San Francisco — extending almost as 
directly as the bird flies, across the broad continent. 
Here run the grooves of Commerce, the routes of 
travel, the pathway of empire. — A. D. Richardson. 

' From lake to gulf, from sea to sea, 

Our country stands defined : 
Godlike, in that she dares to be 

The iriend of human kind ! 

Of liberty, the gift of God, 

She makes a common good ; 
And sees in all upon her sod 

An equal brotherhood.' 

Thou shalt not abhor an Edomite, for he is thy 
brother. 

I know not what record of sin awaits me in the 



120 GERMAN PEASANTRY. 

other world : but this I know, that I was never mean 
enough to despise any man because he was poor, or 
because he was ignorant, or because he was black. — 
Gov. Andrew. 

4 To judge properly of the negro you should see 
him educated, and treated with the respect due to 
a fellow-creature, uninsulted by the filthy aristocracy 
of the skin, and untarnished to the eye of the white 
by any associations connected with the state of 
slavery.' 

6 A Professor Axenfield, of Russian origin, recently 
appointed Professor of Medical Pathology at the 
• College of Medicine in Paris, said in his inaugural 
speech, that the most glorious height to which a 
country could attain, was when she received every 
man, no matter how poor, or of whatever blood or 
race he might be, and gave him full and fair oppor- 
tunities to work and achieve distinction, without 
regard to birth or rank.' 

I thanked the overseer for his information, and 
bade him good day, and he touched his hat and the 
people all wished me a cheerful adieu. But I caught 
a few words from the overseer after my back was 
turned. It was not an order but sounded something 
like this : ' Hear ye people ! The Herr is from Ameri- 
ca. Think ye once ! It is forty times as far as Ber- 
lin, and he has come all the way here to see our Herr 
Oekomierath's famous farm.' Without any inten- 
tion of correcting the latter's error, I unconsciously 



GERMAN PEASANTRY. 121 

turned round and there they all stood. The old wo- 
men were leaning upon their spades, the younger ones 
standing more erect, the children resting their bas- 
kets upon the ground ; they had paused for a moment 
from their work, and there were forty pairs of eyes gaz- 
ing intently upon a stranger from that land of which 
they had heard so much — a land where silver and 
meat and bread were plenty ; the promised land of so 
many oppressed and poor and weary mortals — on 
this side of the great sea. And as I glanced upon 
that heterogeneous mass of faces — upon the heads 
covered with matted hair, some white with the frosts 
of many winters through which they had toiled with 
burdens along the chausees and thought of the suns 
of scores of summers of labor in the hovel, the field, 
the street, and stall, and upon others whose fresh, 
youthful curls were tied back with coarse, tow strings, 
and the freshness of their young lives, too, bound 
down by toil, yet good, kindly faces as they were — 
the thought came over me : ' And this is civilized 
Europe, and this the nineteenth century.' Then my 
eyes grew moist as I turned away once more ; and 
there was a choking in my throat, and there came 
welling up within my soul a feeling of thankfulness 
to the Providence that had made me a citizen of that 
land for whose blessings these less favored ones 
longed so earnestly. — Tribune Cor. 

Spanish women. — There are five thousand of them 
glad to work from morning till night, with their 

6 



122 SPANISH WOMEN. 

babies in their arms, for less than enough to purchase 
the barest necessities of life. The position of a con- 
vict in an American State prison is so vastly better 
than that occupied by these women of Seville, that it 
seems a charity to wish them safely located in that 
happy place. It is such scenes as these that makes 
the American thank Providence for the inestimable 
boon of his nationality. There are five thousand 
women in San Francisco, happy wives and mothers, 
with children that come home from public school five 
days in a week, to find a table spread with food 
known only to the rich in Europe, who owe the whole 
difference in their condition to having been born in 
America, and residing in San Francisco instead of 
Seville. If they were here, they would be as likely 
as not toiling in the tobacco house at -twenty cents 
per day with their half-starved children on their 
knees. It is a good thing for those that labor to be> 
in our favored land, and they should never forget tc 
be thankful for it. — Swift. 

The Jew. — Necessity has made him the mastei 
alike of finance and commerce, and the nation that 
has beaten him by hard blows into inaction or thrust 
him out by persecution, has invariably come to grief 
from the lack of those elements of prosperity which 
he by gift and education knew how to create and 
control. The history of Europe since the fourth 
century is cumulative evidence of this fact. For 
more than one thousand years the Jew was the scorn 



THE JEW. 123 

of every civilized people and the spoil of every ruler. 
He was tortured upon the slightest pretense, and put 
to death on the slightest provocation. Laws gave 
him no protection. To be the owner of houses and 
lands, to freight his own ships, and pasture his own 
herds, only exposed his liberty and life to greater 
jeopardy. Money, or the equivalent of money that 
could be concealed till time of need and then used to 
bribe his oppressor, was his only power. Hence the 
knowledge of the value of coins, bullion, plate, and 
precious stones, gained by the terrible discipline of 
ages, and at the present day apparently, almost intui- 
tive. The gold piece, no matter of what coinage ; 
the'diamond, no matter of what setting ; the pearl and 
ruby and topaz and amethyst and emerald, whether 
prepared for the market or rough from the mine, are 
known to him instantly in their true value. In every 
nation the leading capitalist is a Jew. In every un- 
steady market, in every speculative monetary ven- 
ture, in every critical occasion where tact and caution 
united to boldness and common sense are required 
on the instant, you find the Jew present. 

As remarkable as the Rothschilds for wealth is 
their kinsman, Sir Moses Montefiore, for philanthro- 
py. Taking into the account all his advantages of 
person, gifts, education, wealth, rank, and an age of 
eighty-seven years, by the unanimous voice of the 
European public, irrespective of race or religion, 
there is not the man living, not since John Howard 



124 JEWISH BRETHREN. 

died has the man lived, who has quietly and unos- 
tentatiously achieved so great results in the relief of 
suffering and righting of wrong as this noble English 
Jew. 

In the matter of education the Jews in every 
country and every age have been careful and liberal. 
Intelligence is the marked feature of the race. In 
whatever class of society the Jew moves, he is never 
below its level. — Dodge. 

Jewish Brethren. — If any one desires to revive 
his detestation of caste, the oppression of class by 
class, of color by color, of race by race, let him mark 
in the history of this people how uniformly they rise 
and expand and ennoble when the stigma is removed 
and the repressive laws are abolished. Always com- 
plying with the fundamental conditions of prosperous 
existence, that is, being always as a people chaste, 
temperate, industrious, and frugal, they have only 
needed a fair chance to develop more shining quali- 
ties. America can boast no better citizens, nor more 
refined circles than the good Jewish families of New 
York, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Philadelphia. . . Our 
Israelitish brethren in the United States have their 
own battle to fight. It is substantially the same as 
ours. They, too, have to deal with overwhelming 
masses of ignorance and poverty, just able to get 
across the ocean, and arriving helpless at Castle 
Garden., They too, have to save morality, decency, 
civilization, while the old bondage of doctrine and 



EVIL COUNTER-CURRENTS. 125 

habit is gradually loosened. In this struggle Jews 
and Christians should be allies. — Parton. 

Evils. — In the speech of Mr. Gladstone in London, 
at the Lord Mayor's inauguration, the significant 
confession is made that : ' Whatever the tendencies 
of modern civilization — whatever its triumphs, they 
have not had, nor are they likely to have in our day 
or in our children's the effect of lightening the respon- 
sibilities of the Government.' 

The United States affords evidence, in many por- 
tions of it, that our republican system is afflicted with 
such deep corruption as to produce the apprehensions 
which draw from the English premier his guarded 
but ominous admissions. The times call for wisdom, 
virtue, and prudence, there and here, or wide-spread 
confusion may follow. — Curtis. 

In thee have they set light by father and mother : 
in the midst of thee have they dealt by oppression with 
the stranger: in thee have they vexed the fatherless 
and the widow. 

Tliey have despised mine holy things and hast pro- 
faned my Sabbaths. 

Who is there even among you that woidd shut the 
doors for nought*! neither do ye kindle fire on mine 
altar for nought. 

■' Individuals will exist and be judged and recom- 
pensed in a future world : but bodies politic will 
have no future existence, and are therefore recom- 
pensed in this world.' 



126 PUNISHMENT DELAYED. 

Seventy years of Babylonish Captivity. — To fulfil 
the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah, until 
the land had enjoyed her sabbaths : for so long as she 
lay desolate she kept Sabbath. 

' The penalty of Adam's stain hath descended 
upon all mankind. The small power that remaineth, 
is as it T^ere a spark lying hid in the ashes. This is 
natural reason itself, encompassed about with great 
darkness, yet still retaining power to discern between 
true and false, good and evil, although it be unable 
to fulfil all that it approveth and enjoyeth no longer 
the full light of the truth nor soundness of the affec- 
tions.' 

' my brother ! lose not thy confidence of making 
progress in godliness : there is yet time : the hour 
is not yet past.' 

The good Lord pardon every one that prepareth his 
heart to seek Grod, though he be not cleansed accord- 
big to the purification of the sanctuary. 

17. Sin has changed the customs and habits of 
men, corrupted their maxims, monopolized the use 
of their property, absorbed their minds in vanity, 
blinded their eyes, and corrupted their hearts. It is 
the design of Christianity to eradicate all these evils, 
and to restore to human nature its pristine beauty 
and dignity. If once rightly applied it will purify 
the heart of all its vileness, in spite of long establish- 
ed custom, or caste, or superstition, or an enthralling 
system of priestcraft. Where then is the nation so 



A PAGAN NATION. 127 

vile, that she may not be benefited by the gospel? 
Is India that nation ? — Read. 

India. — ' Young Wilson had applied himself so 
closely to study during his whole college course, that 
the approach of the - final examination — an occasion of 
so much alarm to the dissipated and idle — gave him 
no particular uneasiness. He passed the trying or- 
deal with great credit to himself and carried off the 
prize for an English essay on Common Sense. It is an 
interesting fact that when he descended the rostrum 
Reginald Heber arose to recite his poem of Palestine. 
There is something in the history of these two young 
aspirants who were afterwards called to bear ' the heat 
and burden of the day,' in the same distant field ; 
something also in the scrolls they held, characteristic 
of the men— the one throwing over India the charm 
of poetry, piety, and a loving spirit ; the other stamp- 
ing upon it the impress of Scriptural supremacy and 
evangelical truth : something of adaptation also in 
the ordering of those quiet spots where they rest in 
their graves — the chancel of St. John's Trichino- 
poly, and the chancel of St. Paul's Calcutta.' 

Judson — ' A laborer with moral virtue girt.' — ' The 
laborer has reached his field. It stretched out, a 
wretched, sterile, neglected scene. . . To perform 
the whole work of a pioneer missionary, in his pecu- 
liar sphere of labor, he must become an author in the 
language, a popular preacher, a metaphysical rea- 
soner, a translator of the Scriptures. But for feelijig 



128 JUDSON. 

his way into the heart of a language, and following 
out its innate principles ot development, till the 
whole structure stood in characteristic form before 
his eye, — in this he has had few equals and probably 
no superiors. It was not so much quickness as 
method : the action of a mind naturally clear and 
vigorous, but indebted, for its unerring precision and 
force of movement, to his long course of severe in- 
tellectual training. Had he allowed himself, while 
at school and college, to contract habits of superficial 
study, or had he cut short the term of preparation 
that he might hasten two or three years sooner to 
the field of labor, how different would have been the 
result ! That familiarity with the general laws of 
language, and with the genius of various languages 
which he had derived from a critical study of the 
classical and Hebrew tongues, were, in his case, what 
Belzoni's researches among the labyrinths of Thebes 
were to him, when he sat down before the blank wall 
of the pyramid of Cephrenes, and reasoned out the 
passage to its interior treasures. No time, after 
arriving on missionary ground, was wasted in 
blundering guesswork ; every step he advanced 
was taken once for all. Within three years after 
entering Burmah, the man who had acquired his 
first little stock of words by pointing to the com- 
mon objects about him, and catching their* names 
from the lips of the natives, prepared a grammar 
of the language, which must be reckoned among the 



JUDSON. 129 

most remarkable productions in the field of philo- 
logy. • 

He denied himself all English reading, except a 
singlo newspaper and a few books of devotion ; re- 
linquished so far as possible English society and cor- 
respondence ; and sought by exclusive intercourse 
with the natives, and with the literature of the 
country, the power not merely of using the words of 
the language with facility, but of thinking and feel- 
ing, of living wholly in it. The result was, a style 
of composition in which his own strong mental 
characteristics spontaneously expressed themselves 
with all the freshness and force of one ' to the manor 
born.' His Burman Bible has been pronounced * per- 
fect as a literary work.' Bat its highest praise is in 
the fact, that it is free from all obscurity to the Bur- 
man mind. It must ever be, like Wickliffe's in the 
English, the basis and model of all others for the 
use of the people. — Mr*. Coxant. 

Lying here on my bed I have had such views of 
the loving condescension of Christ and the glories of 
heaven, as I believe are seldom granted to mortal 
man. It is not because I shrink from death that I 
wish to live, but -a few years would not be missed 
from my eternity of bliss. — Judsox. 

From Olive's third visit to India dates the purity 

of the administration of our Eastern empire. He 

first made- dauntless and unsparing war on that 

gigantic system of oppression, extortion, and corrup- 

6* 



130 CLIVE. 

tion. In that war he manfully put to hazard his 
ease, his fame, and his splendid fortune. The same 
sense of justice which forbade us to conceal or ex- 
tenuate the faults of his earlier days, compels us to 
admit that those faults were nobly repaired. If the 
reproach of the Company and of its servants has 
been taken away — if in India the yoke of foreign 
masters, elsewhere the heaviest of all yokes, has 
been found lighter than that of any native dynasty — 
if to that gang of public robbers which once spread ter- 
ror through the whole plain of Bengal, has succeeded 
a body of functionaries not more highly distinguished 
by ability and diligence than by integrity, disinterest- 
edness and public spirit — if we now see men like 
Munro, Elphinstone, and Metcalfe, after leading vic- 
torious armies, after making and deposing kings, 
return, proud of their honorable poverty, from a land 
which once held out to every greedy factor the hope 
of boundless wealth — the praise is in no small degree 
due to Clive. His name stands high on the roll ot 
conquerors. But it is found on a better list — in 
the list of those who have done and suffered much 
for the happiness of mankind. — Macaulay. 

If difficulties try the powers of superior minds, 
Hastings, on assuming the government had a bound- 
less field for the exercise of his talents in Bengal. 
Popular sufferings, disease and dilapidation, the re- 
sult of a tremendous* pestilence which had swept away 
a third of the people, suppressed all those energies 



HASTINGS. 131 

which the cessation of war and the protecting spirit 
of a British government might have renewed. The 
treasury was almost empty— the revenues were sink- 
ing year by year ; the farmer, the traveller, and the 
merchant were rapidly disappearing, and in their 
place had come the robber and the tiger. Hastings 
applied himself vigorously to check this flood of evil, 
and he soon showed the value of practised experi- 
ence and intellectual vigor in encountering the se- 
verest public privations. His first work was, to put 
down the lawlessness which had exposed life and 
property to constant violence ; and the bands of rob- 
bers, almost legalized by long impunity, found them-, 
selves, to their astonishment, suddenly made the ob- 
jects of a vigorous police. The revenue system next 
came under his unhesitating hand. He rapidly puri- 
fied its details and at once increased the amount of 
the public receipts, and diminished the expense of 
their collection. He next established District Courts, 
and so far, in principle, showed that justice might be 
brought to the doors of the population. Then, as- 
cending to the higher machinery of the system, he 
divided the supreme council into committees, and by 
appointing intelligent and active superintendents in 
place of inefficient boards, gave the force of respon- 
sibility to office, and brought the whole apparatus of 
government into a condition to meet any emergency. 
And all this was the work of two years. — Black- 
wood's MAGAZINE. 



132 MAXIMILIAN. 

30. Mexico. — c Maximilian alighted from the car- 
riage as they reached the spot, and with careless 
grace brushing the dust from his garments, advanced 
toward the line of soldiers, arid inquired who were 
to fire upon him. The^ platoon being pointed out, he 
gave to each of them a piece of gold, and requested 
them to aim well at his heart. He then approached 
M. and M., and embracing them three times with 
much fervor said : ' In a few moments we shall meet 
in another world.' — Advancing with admirable cool- 
ness, he said : ' Mexicans ! men of my class and my 
origin who are animated with my sentiments are 
destined by providence to make the happiness of 
people, or be their martyrs. When I came among 
you I did not bring with me illegitimate ideas. . . 
Before descending into the grave, I will add that 
I take with me the consolation of having done all 
the good in my power. . . May my blood be the last 
spilled, and may it regenerate Mexico, my unfortun- 
ate adopted country.' 

A man of some real nobleness, this Albert, though 
not with wisdom enough, or good fortune enough 
could he have continued to rule the situation, to 
march the fanatical papistries and Kaiser Karl clear 
out of it and home to Spain and San Justo a little 
earlier, to wave the coming Jesuistries away as with 
a flaming sword, to forbid beforelfland the Thirty 
Years' War, and the still dolefuler spiritual atrophy 
which has followed therefrom. He might have been 



ALBERT. 133 

a German Cromwell beckoning his people to fly eagle- 
like straight toward the sun, instead of screwing about 
in that sad, uncertain, and far too spiral a manner. 

— Carlyle. 

7. Total Eclipse of the Sun. — The mighty pall of 
darkness hung over us for almost three minutes! 
At two minutes after five as we stood gazing at the 
black orb, with its magnificent corona, a sudden flash 
of golden light burst forth from the northern limb. 
It was the most thrilling instant I ever knew, and the 
most splendid spectacle I ever witnessed. As if 
God said : ' Let there be light,' a sheaf of dazzling 
rays burst forth in a twinkling and came flying to- 
ward us through the air. The whole sky lightened 
instantaneously. — Cuyler. 

From Portsmouth to Or an to see the Eclipse. — The 
clouds and blue spaces fought for a time with varying 
success. The sun was hidden and revealed at inter- 
vals, hope oscillating in synchronism with the 
changes of the sky. At the moment of first contact 
a dense cloud intervened, but a minute or two after- 
wards the cloud had passed and the encroachment of 
the black body of the moon was evident upon the 
solar disc. The moon marched onward and I saw it 
at frequent intervals : a large group of spots were 
approached and swallowed up. Subsequently I 
caught sight of the lunar limb as it cut through the 
middle of a large spot. The spot was not to be dis- 
tinguished from the moon, but rose like a mountain 



134 THE ECLIPSE. 

above it. The clouds, when thin, could be seen as 
grey scud drifting across the black surface of the 
moon : but they thickened more and more and made 
the intervals of clearness scantier. During these 
moments, I watched with an interest bordering upon 
fascination the march of the silver sickle of the sun 
across the field of the telescope. It was so sharp 
and so beautiful. No trace of the lunar limb could 
be observed beyond the sun's boundary. Here, in- 
deed, it could only be relieved by the corona which 
was utterly cut off by the dark glass. The blackness 
of the moon beyond the sun was, in fact, confounded 
with the blackness of space. Beside me was Elliot 
with the watch and lantern, while Lieutenant Archer, 
of the royal engineers, had the kindness to take 
charge of my note-book. I mentioned, and lie wrote 
rapidly down, such things as seemed worthy of re- 
membrance. Thus my hands and mind were entire- 
ly free ; but it was all to no purpose. A patch of 
sunlight fell and rested upon the landscape some 
miles away. It was the only illuminated spot within 
view. But to the northwest there was still a . space 
of blue which might reach us in time. Within seven 
minutes of totality, another small space toward the 
zenith became very dark. The atmosphere was, as 
it were, on the brink of a precipice ; it was charged 
with humidity, which required but a slight chill to 
bring it down in clouds. This was furnished by the 
withdrawal of the solar beams ; the clouds did come 



THE ECLIPSE. 135 

down, covering up the space of blue on which our 
hopes had so long rested. I abandoned the telescope 
and walked to and fro like a leopard in its cage. 
As the moment of totality approached, the descent 
toward darkness was as obvious as a falling stone. 
I looked toward a distant ridge where I knew the 
darkness would first appear. At the moment a fan 
of beams issuing from the hidden sun, was spread 
out over the southern heavens. These beams are 
bars of alternate light and shade, produced in illum- 
inated haze by the shadows of floating cloudlets of 
varying density. The beams are really parallel, but 
by an effect of perspective they appear divergent, like 
a fan, having the sun, in fact, for their point of inter- 
section. The darkness took possession of the ridge 
to which I have referred, lowered upon M. Janssen's 
observatory, passed over the southern heavens, blot- 
ting out the beams as if a sponge had been drawn 
across them. It then took successive possession of 
three spaces of blue sky in the south-eastern atmos- 
phere. I again looked toward the ridge. A glim- 
mer as of clay-dawn was behind it ; and immediately 
afterwards the fan of beams which had been for 
two minutes absent revived in all its strength and 
splendor. The eclipse had ended, and as far as the 
corona was concerned we had been defeated. — Tyn- 
dall. 

12. With clouds he covereth the light; and com- 
mandeth it not to shine by the cloud that cometh be- 



136 A PINT OF WATER. 

ttvizt. For he malceth small the drops of water ; they 
pour down rain according to the vapor thereof ; Which 
the clouds do drop and distil upon man abundantly. 

Let us trace the progress of a single pint of the 
water thus elaborated from where it first alights on 
the spongy soil in a wintry shower, till where it spark- 
les in a glass in the pump room at Cheltenham. It 
falls among the flat hills that sweep around the an- 
cient city of Worcester, and straightway buries itself, 
all fresh and soft in the folds of the Upper New Red 
Sandstone where they incline gently to the east. It 
percolates in its downward progress along one of the 
unworkable seams of rock-salt that occur in the su- 
perior marls in the formation ; and as it pursues fur- 
long after furlong its subterranean journey, savors 
more and more strongly of the company it keeps ; be- 
comes in succession hard, brackish, saline, briny ; and 
then many fathoms below the level at which it had 
entered escapes from the saliferous stratum through -a 
transverse fissure, into an inferior Liasic bed. And 
here it trickles for many hundred yards through a 
pyritiferous shale, on which its biting salts act so 
powerfully that it becomes strongly tinctured by the 
iron oxide and acidulated by the sulphur. And now 
it forces its upward way through the minute crevices 
of a dolomitic limestone, which its salts and acids 
serve partially to decompose, so that to its salt, iron 
and sulphur, it now adds its lime and its magnesia. 
And now it flows through beds of organic remains, 



A PINT OF WATER. 137 

animal and vegetable — now through a stratum of bel- 
emnites, and now a layer of fish — now besidea seam 
of lignite, and now along a vein of bitumen. Here 
it carries along with it a dilute infusion of what had 
been once the muscular tissue of a crocodile, and 
here the strainings of an ichthyosaurus. And now it 
comes gushing to the light in an upper Liasic stratum, 
considerably higher in the geologic scale, than the 
saiiferous sandstones into which it had at first sunk, 
but considerably lower with reference to the existing 
levels. And now take it and drink it off at once, 
without pause or breathing space. It is not palat- 
able, and it smells villianously, but never did apothe- 
cary mix up a more curiously compounded draught ; 
and if it be not as salutary as it is elaborate, the 
faculty are sadly in error. 

The art of deciphering the ancient hieroglyphics 
sculptured on the rocks of our country, is gradually 
extending from the few to the many. "When the 
hard names of the science shall become familiar 
enough no longer to obscure its poetry, it will be 
found that what I have attempted to do, will be 
done proportionately to their measure of ability by 
travellers generally. — Hugh Miller. 

The earth trembles, and the waters are vexed, with 
the application of all those forces which science has 
presented for the perfection of man's dominion and 
power over the material world. The victory of Ful- 
ton and Pitch and Watt and Arkwright and Stephen- 



138 THE SCIENTIFIC PERIOD. 

son is complete. And should science advance into 
that great region of thought and speculation, where 
faith is to be confirmed and unerring dogmas of pub- 
lic economy are to be proclaimed, I am sure the last 
step would then have been taken toward making this 
great and diverse municipality as perfect in its reli- 
gion and politics as it now is in all the practical 
affairs of active and vigorous life. 

Everywhere in cultivated and civilized society may 
be found an intense and serious effort to infuse the 
accuracy of scientific investigation into all practical 
affairs, and into the broad foundations of the Church 
and the State. The scientific period has arrived. 
The prediction made by Dr. Young in the latter part 
of the last century — has been more than fulfilled. 

Remembering as he did, that the last two hundred 
years have done much more for the promotion of 
knowledge than the two thousand years which pre- 
ceded them, he says : 4 We have, therefore, the 
satisfaction of viewing the knowledge of nature not 
only in a state of advancement, but even advancing 
with increasing rapidity : and the universal diffusion 
of a taste for science appears to promise that, as the 
numbers of its cultivators increases, new facts will 
be continually discovered, and those which are al- 
ready known will be better understood and more 
beneficially applied.' 

The history of American industry teaches that la- 
bor is not only wealth and national prosperity, but 



LAND AND LABOR. 139 

social dignity as well. Our great imperishable treas- 
ures are land and labor. Unite the two and you 
have the foundation upon which all the more im- 
posing and fleeting fabrics may rest, and for the 
strength of which the mind of man may exhaust it- 
self in devising means and methods. Intelligent 
labor, owning a well cultivated soil — this is the foun- 
dation. And around this may gather all the arts of 
life, in which toil shall receive a competent subsist- 
ence, and the hardships of labor maybe ameliorated by 
that mutual understanding which should belong to an 
intelligent and well-educated community. — Loring. 

13. Certainty. Mr. Gladstone at Liverpool Col- 
lege. — But in preparing yourselves for the combat of 
life, I beg you to take this also into your account, 
that the spirit of denial is abroad, and has challenged 
all religion, but especially the religion we profess, 
to a combat of life and death. I venture to offer 
you a few suggestions, in the hope that they may not 
be without their use. You will hear in your aftcr- 
. life much of the duty and delight of following free 
thought ; and in truth the man who does not value 
the freedom of his thoughts deserves to be described 
as Homer described the slave : he is but half a man. 
St. Paul, I suppose, was a teacher of free thought, 
when he bade his converts to prove all things ; but 
it seems he went terribly astray when he proceeded 
to bid them ' hold fast that which is good.' But 
the free thought of which we now hear so much 



140 THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE. 

seems too often to mean, thought roving and vagrant 
more than free, like Delos drifting on the seas of 
Greece without a route, a direction, or a home. 
Again you will hear incessantly of the advancement 
of the present age, and of the backwardness of those 
which have gone before it. And truly, it has been a 
wonderful age ; but let us not exaggerate. It has 
been, and it is an age of immense mental as well as 
material activity : it is by no means an age abound- 
ing in minds of the first order, who become great, 
immortal teachers of mankind. It has tapped, as it 
were, and made disposable for man, vast natural 
forces ; but the mental power employed, is not to be 
measured by the mere size of the results. To per- 
fect that marvel of traffic, the locomotive, has per- 
haps not required the expenditure of more mental 
strength and application and devotion than to per- 
fect that marvel of music, the violin. In the ma- 
terial sphere, the achievements of the age are plenti- 
ful and unmixed. In the social sphere they are 
great and noble, but seem ever to be confronted by. 
a succession of new problems, which almost defy 
solution. In the sphere of pure intellect, I doubt 
whether posterity will rate us as highly as we rate 
ourselves. In the goods of this world we may ad- 
vance by strides, but it is by steps only, and not 
strides, and by slow, and not always steady steps, 
that all desirable improvement of man in the higher 
ranges of his being is effected. Again, my friends, 



THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE. 141 

you will hear much to the effect that the divisions 
among Christians render it impossible to say what 
Christianity is, and so destroy the certainty of reli- 
gion. But if the divisions among Christians are re- 
markable, not less so is their unity in the greatest 
doctrines that they hold. Well nigh fifteen hundred 
years have passed away since the great controversies 
concerning the Deity and the person of the Redeemer 
were, after a long agony, determined. Ever since 
that time, amid all chance and change, more — aye, 
many more — than ninety-nine in every hundred 
Christians have with one will confessed the deity and 
incarnation of our Lord as the cardinal and central 
truths of our religion. Surely there is some comfort 
here — some sense of brotherhood— some glory in the 
past — some hope for the times that are to come. 

14. Superstition. A false divination in their sight. 
— The minds of the people of England in general 
were, at this momentous crisis, laboring under a 
painful depression occasioned by the appearance of 
the splendid three-tailed comet, which became visible 
in their horizon at the commencement of the memor- 
able year 1066, a few days before the death of King 
Edward. The unsettled state of the succession, and 
the superstitious spirit of the age, inclined all classes 
of Dersons to regard with ominous feelings of dismay 
and phenomenon which could be construed into a 
portent of evil : moreover the astrologers who fore- 
told the approach of this comet had thought proper 



142 SUPERSTITION. 

to announce their prediction in an oracular distich, 
of which the following rude couplet is a literal trans- 
lation : — 

' In the year one thousand and sixty-six, 
Comets to England's sons an end shall fix/ 

The Norrnan Conquest in 1066. — The knights and 
archers landed first. After the soldiers came the 
carpenters, armorers and masons. Last of all came 
the duke, who stumbling as he leaped to shore, meas- 
ured his majestic height upon the beach. Forthwith 
all raised a cry of distress. ' An evil sign is here ! ' 
exclaimed the superstitious Normans : but the duke 
who, in recovering himseif, had filled his hands with 
sand cried out in a loud and cheerful voice : ' See 
seigneurs ! I have seized England with my two 
hands. Without challenge ;io prize can be made, 
and that which I have grasped I will by your good 
help maintain. ' 

When William was arming for the encounter in 
his haste and agitation, he unwittingly put on his 
hawberk the hind part before. He quickly changed 
it, but perceiving from the looks of consternation 
among the by-standers, that his mistake had been ob- 
served and construed into an omen of ill, he smiling- 
ly observed : ' I have seen many a man, who, if such 
a thing had happened to him, would not have entered 
the battlefield. But I never believed in omens, nor 
have I ever put my faith in fortune-tellers, nor 
divinations of any kind, for my trust is in God. 



ASTROLOGY. 143 

Let not this mischance discourage you, for if this 
change import aught, it is that the power of my 
dukedom shall be turned into a kingdom.' — Miss 
Strickland. 

The king of Babylon stood at the head of the two 
ways, to use divination; he made his arrows bright, 
he consulted with images. 

Astrology. — One of the most remarkable believers 
in that forgotten and despised science, was a late 
professor in the art of legerdemain. One would have 
thought that a person of his description ought, from 
his knowledge of the thousand ways in which human 
eyes could be deceived, to have been less than others 
subject to the fantasies of superstition. Perhaps the 
habitual use of those abstruse calculations by which 
in a manner surprising to the artist himself, many 
tricks upon cards etc., are performed, induced this 
gentleman to study the combination of the stars and 
planets with the expectation of obtaining prophetic 
communications. He constructed a scheme of his 
own nativity, calculated according to such rules of art 
as he could collect from the best astrological authors. 
The result of the past he found to be agreeable to 
what had hitherto befallen him, but in the important 
prospect of the future, a singular difficulty occurred. 
There were two years during the course of which he 
could by no means obtain any exact knowledge 
whether the subject of the scheme would be dead or 
ali^e. Anxious concerning so remarkable a circum- 



144 ASTROLOGY. 

stance, lie gave the scheme to a brother astrologer, 
who was also baffled in the same manner. At one 
period he found the native or subject was certainly 
alive ; at another that he was unquestionably dead; 
but a space of two years extended between these two 
terms, during which he could find no certainty as to 
his death or existence. The astrologer continued 
his exhibitions in various parts of the empire, until 
the period was about to expire during which his exist- 
ence had been warranted as actually ascertained. At 
last, while he was exhibiting to a numerous audience 
his usual tricks of legerdemain, the hands whose activ- 
ity had so often baffled the closest observer, suddenly 
lost their power, the cards dropped from them, and he 
sank down a disabled paralytic. In this state the 
artist languished for two years, when he was at length 
removed by death. The fact, if truly reported, is one 
of those singular coincidences which occasionally ap- 
pear differing so widely from ordinary calculation, yet 
without which irregularities, human life would not 
present to mortals looking into futurity the abyss of 
impenetrable darkness which it is the pleasure of the 
Creatpr it should offer to them. Were everything 
to happen in the ordinary train of events, the future 
would be subject to the rules of Arithmetic, like the 
chances of gaming. But extraordinary events, and 
wonderful runs of luck defy the calculations of man- 
kind, and throw impenetrable darkness on future 
contingencies. — Walter Scott. 



ERSKINE. 145 

' According to our human observation it is not well 
for man to know the destiny of his being in all its 
details, until the trials and victories of life have 
taught him, to turn such knowledge to elevating use.' 

Erskine left his native land with the disheartening 
prospect of dying a half-pay lieutenant : — but when 
he next revisited it, he was an Ex-Chancellor, a 
Peer and a Knight of the Thistle — ^what was far 
more valuable, he had achieved for himself the repu- 
tation of the greatest forensic orator that Britain 
ever produced. . . Riding over a blasted heath be- 
tween Lewes and Guilford with his friend William 
Adam, afterwards Lord Chief-Commissioner of the 
Jury Court in Scotland, (whether from some super- 
natural communication, or the workings of his own 
fancy I know not,) he exclaimed after a long silence : 
' Willie, the time will come when I shall be invested 
with the robes of the Lord Chancellor, and Star of 
the Thistle will blaze on my bosom ! ' — Campbell's 
Chancellors. 

Why seeing times are not hidden from the Al- 
mighty, do they that know him not see his days? 
For man also hwiveth not his time ; as the fishes that 
are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are 
caught in the snare, so are the sons of men snared in 
an evil time, when itfalleth suddenly upon them. 

15. Men of excellent repute for wisdom, common 
sense, and especially for fervid piety, have frequently 
net merely entertained but courageousiv avowed q, 
7 



146 DEEAMS. 

lively faith in the providential and prophetic char- 
acter of dreams. How far this, with the well edu- 
cated, has ever deserved the respectable name of 
positive belief, it would require a nice and extensive 
investigation to determine. — Tribune. 

Undoubted proof has been afforded that the energy 
of the intellect is sometimes greater during sleep 
than at other times, and many a problem, it is as- 
serted, has been solved in sleep which has puzzled 
the waking sense. Cabanis tells us that Franklin on 
several occasions mentioned to him that he had been 
assisted in dreams in the conduct of many affairs in 
which he was engaged. Condilla states that while 
writing his Course of Studies he was frequently oblig- 
ed to leave the chapter incomplete and. retire to bed, 
and that on awakening he found it, on more than one 
occasion, finished in his head. In like manner Con- 
dorcet would sometimes leave his complicated specu- 
lations unfinished, and after retiring to rest would find 
their results unfolded to him in his dreams. — Har- 
per's Weekly. 

But though our dreams are often wild, 
Like clouds before the driving storm, 

Yet some important may be styled, 

Sent to admonish or inform. — Newton. 

The same God who most expressly warns against 
false dreams, not unfrequently directs his people by 
true ones. For the sincere, who were really con- 



TRUE AND FALSE DREAMS. 147 

cerned for the truth — he discloses infallible criteria 
by which to distinguish genuine visions from false 
ones. Yet as these are modified by individual dis- 
position they can be reduced to no objective rules. — 
Olshausen. 

Hoivhast thou plentifully declared the thing as it is. 

Fonvarned. — Some very sensible persons will ac- 
knowledge that in old times God spoke by dreams, 
but affirm with much boldness that he has since ceased 
to do so. If you ask them why ? They answer, be- 
cause he has now revealed his will in the Scripture, and 
there is no longer any need that he should instruct and 
admonish us by dreams. I grant that with respect to 
doctrines and precepts he has left us in want of 
nothing ; but has he thereby precluded himself in any 
of the operations of his providence ? Surely not. It 
is perfectly a different consideration ; and the same 
need that there was of his interference in this way, 
there is still and ever must be, while man continues 
blind and fallible, and a creature beset with dangers 
which lie can neither foresee nor obviate. His opera- 
tions of this kind are, I allow, very rare. — Cowper. 

The misery of man is great upon him. For he 
knoweth not that which shall be : for who can tell him 
ivhen it shall be ? 

Lord Littleton's vision — predicting his death. The 
exact fulfilment. — Dr. Johnson said : 'It is the most 
extraordinary thing that has happened in my day. 
I heard it with my own ears from his uncle, Lord 



148 PREDICTIONS. 

Westcote. I am so glad to have every evidence 
of the spiritual world that I am willing to believe 
it.' 

There is a thing that has made considerable im- 
pression on me. A week before the war at Morpeth, 
I dreamed distinctly many of the circumstances of 
our late battle off the enemy's port, and I believe I 
told you of it at the time ; but I never dreamed that 
I was to be made a peer of the realm. — Lord Col- 
lingwood. 

Can a devil open the eyes of the blind? Nebuchad- 
nezzar's dream. Noiv thou, Belteshazzar, declare 
the interpretation. All the wise men of my kingdom 
are not able ; — but thou art able ; for the spirit of the 
holy gods is in thee. Then Daniel was astonied for 
one hour and his thoughts troubled him. It is thou, 
king, that art grown and become strong. They 
shall drive thee from men — and shall make thee to eat 
grass as oxen. — Wherefore, king, let my counsel be 
acceptable unto thee, and break off thy sins by right- 
eousness, and thine iniquities by showing mercy to the 
poor, if it may be a lengthening of thy tranquility. 

17. A certain fearful looking for of judgment. 
. Henry I. — In the year 1130, the king complained 
to Grimbald, his Saxon physician, that he was sore 
disquieted of nights, and that he seemed to see a 
great number of husbandmen, with their rustical 
tools stand about him, threatening him with wrongs 
done against them. Sometimes he appeared to see 



THE HAND OF GOD. 149 

his knights and soldiers threatening him ; which sight 
so feared him in his sleep that oftimes he rose un- 
drest out of his bed, took weapon in hand and 
sought to kill them he could not find. Grimbald, 
being a notable wise man, expounded his dreams by 
true conjecture, and willed him to reform himself 
by alms and prayers. . . When Henry had embarked 
for England, in June 1131, he was so dismayed by 
the bursting of a water-spout over the vessel and the 
fury of the wind and waves, that believing that his 
last hour was at hand he made a penitent acknow- 
ledgment of his sins, promising to lead a new life, 
if it should please God to preserve him from the 
peril of death, and above all, he vowed to repeal the 
oppressive impost of danegelt for seven years. 

After Edward had marched through France with- 
out resistance, and, (if the truth must be spoken) 
desolating as he went a bleeding and suffering coun- 
try in a most ungenerous manner, his career was 
stopped as he was hastening to lay seige to Paris by 
the hand of God itself. One of those dreadful 
thunder-storms which at distant cycles pass over the 
continent of France, literally attacked the invading 
army within two leagues of Chartres and wreaked 
its utmost fury on the proud chivalry of England. 
Six thousand of Edward's finest horses, and one 
thousand of his bravest cavaliers, among whom were 
the heirs of Warwick and Morlev, were struck 
dead before him. The guilty ambition of Edward 



150 FIRE FROM HEAYEN. 

smote his conscience ; he knelt down on the spot, 
and spreading his hands toward the Church of our 
Lady of Chartres vowed to stop the effusion of blood 
and make peace on the spot with Prance. His queen 
who wished well to the noble-minded king of France 
held him to his resolution. — Miss Strickland. 

And Elijah ansivered. If I be a man of Cod, then 
let fire come down from heaven and consume thee and 
thy fifty. And there came down fire from heaven and 
consumed him and his fifty. 

And ye shall know that I am the Lord for ye have 
not walked in my statutes. 

Charles IX. — The king thrown out into the hideous 
torrent of blood, became drunk with frenzy, and let 
slaughter have its way, till even Guise himself af- 
fected to be shocked, and interposed to put an end to 
it. Some twenty months later, Charles IX. lay dy- 
ing of hemorrhage — he was haunted with hideous 
dreams ; the darkness was peopled with ghosts which 
were mocking and mowing at him, and he would 
start out of his sleep to find himself in a pool of 
blood — blood — ever blood. The night before his 
end, the nurse — a Huguenot, heard him sob and 
sigh. 

Ah ! he muttered, but I was ill-advised. God have 
mercy on me and on my country ; what will become 
of that ? What will become of me ? I am lost — I 
know it but too well. The nurse told him that the 
blood would be on the heads of those who had mis- 



CONSCIENCE. 151 

led him, on them and on their accursed # counsels. He 
sighed again and blessed God that he had left no son 
to inherit his crown and his infamy. — Froude. 

There is no future pang:, 

Can deal that justice on the self-condemned, 

He deals on his own soul. — Byrox. 

19. Conscience. — Beyond measure I persecuted the 
Church of Cod, and toasted it. — I verily thought ivith 
myself \ that I sought to do many things contrary to 
the name of Jesus, 

Who sees not that our judgments of virtue and 
vice, right and wrong, are not always formed from 
an enlightened and dispassionate use of our reason 
in . the investigation of truth ? They are more gen- 
erally formed from the nature of the religion we 
profess; from the quality of the civil government 
under which we live ; from the general manners of 
the age, or the particular manners of the persons 
with whom we associate ; from the books we have 
read at a more advanced period ; and from other 
accidental causes. — Watson. 

Xow one of the most curious, entertaining, and 
instructive things on earth is the observation of the 
various lights in which a pictorial work that touches 
the springs of social action is regarded by the differ- 
ent thinkers, writers, and talkers, who represent 
classes.' In seriously answering the inquiry: 'What 
does all this amount to ? ' how queerly opposed to 
each other are the summings up which express the 



152 CHURCH POWER AND GOOD MEN. 

main lesson oi ideal or of practical value. — Art Cri- 
tic. 

And when they saw him they worshipped him, but 
some doubted. 

And vjhen they heard of the resurrection from the 
dead, some mocked and others said : We will hear 
thee again of this matter. 

The confiscation of Church property was an en- 
ormous loss of Church power. It held two-thirds of 
this city in possession. It held mortgages in as large 
a portion of the country. Letting its money at a 
low figure and on liberal and long terms, it gradually 
became an enormous savings bank, and controlled 
the whole landed interest of the country. Its con- 
vents covered hundreds of acres in the heart of the 
city, and were adorned in the highest degree that 
art and wealth could devise. Gardens, lakes, marble 
cloisters, elegantly wrought in polished marble, 
churches of splendor in construction and ornamenta- 
tion, were the unseen luxurious abodes of the world- 
denying friars and nuns. Corruption of the most 
startling sort abounded ; and money, the sinews of 
the state, was in the hands exclusively of the cor- 
rupted and corrupters. Good men may have been 
involved in this arrangement, may have presided over 
it. Good men have been connected with every con- 
trolling evil the world has ever seen. An orthodox 
Congregational minister called his burning satire 
against New England's demoralization under rum 



THE TRUE OPINION. 153 

' Deacon Giles' Distillery,' and the slaveholding sys- 
tem of English West Indies was supported by rectors 
of the Episcopal Church, and of our own land by 
bishops of the Methodist Church, South. So we are 
all in condemnation and none can throw stones at the 
former growth of the Roman- Church in Mexico. — 
G. Haven. 

20. What is truth?— 

What a loud roaring loose and empty matter is 
this tornado of vociferation men call ' Public Opin- 
ion,' tragically howling round a man who has to 
stand silent the while ; and scan wisely under pain 
of death, the altogether inarticulate, dumb, and inex- 
orable matter which the gods call Fact. — Carlyle. 

Have faith in truth, never in numbers. The great 
surge of numbers rolls up noisily and imposingly, 
but flats out on the shore, and slides back into the 
muds of oblivion. But the true opinion is the ocean 
itself, calm in its rest, eternal in its power. Its life 
is in moral ideas, which is the life of God. — Beech^r, 

Th*. 7 ~w of truth is in his mouth. — 

Think truly and thy thoughts 
Shall the world's famine feed ; 
Speak truly, and each word of thine 
Shall be a fruitful seed. 
Live truly, and thy life shall be 
A £reat and noble creed. — Boxar. 



154 LAWS. 

Prove thou the rejected stone, 

True to the Eternal Square ; 
And the mighty Builder may 

In the wondrous scheme of man 
Set thy life some glorious day, 

The grand Key-Stone of his plan. 

— E. A. Browne, 

A soul at one with what is just, 
And balanced like a poised lance- 

A will to quit the narrow lea, 

Whose stilly bounds the winds forsake. 

— WlLLARD. 

The one great effort of such a mind is to divest 
itself of all prejudice, of all desire that may operate 
in the secret chambers of* the mind and derange the 
logical processes and vitiate the results to be obtain- 
ed. The mind having adopted this method, pursues 
its inductive and deductive processes with a supreme 
desire for the truth, whether the truth be agreeable 
or disagreeable. This quality of mind is not simply 
an intellectual virtue ; it is a moral one as well. 
"We may look with confidence to such a mind for the 
supreme desire of justice, not only to truth for its own 
sake, but for justice to individuals for truth's sake. 
Blind, contagious, intellectual impulse finds no lodg- 
ment in such a mind. — Patterson. 

Of literary merit Johnson, as we all know, was a 
sagacious, but a most severe judge. Such was his 



A KIXGLY APPEARANCE. 155 

discernment that he pierced into the most secret 
springs of human actions : and such was his integrity 
that he always weighed the moral characters of his 
fellow-creatures in the ' balance of the sanctuary.' 
He was too courageous to propitiate a rival, and too 
proud to truckle to a superior. By the testimony of 
such a man, impertinence must be abashed and 
malignity itself softened. — Macaulay. 

21. Israel's choice. 'Griue us a Jciny. Samuel pray- 
ed. TJie Lord said hearken to their voice yet protest 
solemnly. They have not rejected thee, but they have 
rejected me that I should not reiyn over the . 

A poor prophet in a mantle, though conversant 
with the visions of the Almighty, looked mean in 
their eyes who judged by outward appearance ; but a 
king in a purple robe, with his guard and officers of 
state would look great. When God chose a king 
after his own heart, he pitched upon one who was 
not at all remarkable for the height of his stature, 
or anything in his countenance, but the innocency 
and sweetness that appeared there. But when he 
chose a king after the people's heart, who aimed at 
nothing so much as stateliness and grandeur, he 
pitched upon this huge, tall man, who if he had no 
other good qualities would look great. — Henry. 

Countess — . ... Is this the scourge of France, 
Is this the Talbot so much feared abroad, 
That with his name, the mothers still their babes ? 
I see, report is fabulous and false : 



156 talbot's composition. 

I thought I should have seen some Hercules, 

A second Hector for his grim aspect 

And large proportion of his strong-knit limbs. 

Alas ! this is a child, a silly dwarf: 

It cannot be, this weak and writhled shrimp 

Should strike such terror to his enemies. 
Tal. — Madam, I have been bold to trouble you 

But, since your ladyship is not at leisure, 

I'll sort some other time to visit you. 

(The gates being forced, enter soldiers.) 
Countess — Victorious Talbot ! pardon my abuse : 

I find thou art no less than fame hath bruited, 

And more than may be gathered by thy shape. 

Let my presumption not provoke thy wrath ; 

For I am sorry that with reference 

I did not entertain thee as thou art. 
Tal. — Be not dismay'd, fair lady ; nor misconstrue 

The mind of Talbot, as you did mistake 

The outward composition of his body. 

What you have done hath not offended me. 

— King Henry IV. 

The bee that gathers treasures from every flower 
has not the finest coating. The eagle that soars on 
majestic wing to the birth of the morning has not 
the most glittering plumage. It is the butterfly that 
idly floats on the passing breeze that the fopling 
emulates. — Dehon. 

Irregularity of feature is the rule. They are 
often even distorted : and yet I must say that I have 
seen some magnificent countenances and figures 
among the German peasantry. Here for instance is 
one — aa old woman — she must be at least sixty. 



NATIVE DIGNITY. 157 

She stops for a moment, and leans upon her spade, 
while the youngster who drops potatoes for her, likely 
enough her grandchild, runs off to get her basket 
filled from a supply that a girl had just brought up. 
And as the old dame, I was going to say, though she 
is a poor, old peasant woman, turns about and looks 
up for a minute, the old rag that she has bound 
around her head falls back, revealing a profile, a 
forehead that would have graced a court. The gray 
locks that float in the light breeze were surely thick 
and flowing two-score of years ago. The cheeks, the 
bare neck, and thinly covered shoulders, wrinkled 
and sunken with years of toil and care, have lost 
their charms : but traces of lines of delicate beauty 
and stately grace linger even yet. And now, as she 
turns toward me, she meets my gaze with an un- 
abashed, courteous, and even dignified look ; and 
then there is a slight play of the features, a glance 
at the spade, at the toil worn hands, and back to me 
again, with her rich, black eyes looking straight in 
mine, and I think : ' Fortunate is it for your peace 
of mind, young man, that that old woman isn't forty 
years younger.' There is, to the glory of the human 
soul be it said, a germ of pride therein, that the mean- 
est poverty cannot root out, and often one is met 
even in the lowest walks of liie by those whose very 
air and mien proclaim : ' Even in my rags and misery 
I am your equal.' — Tribune Cor. 



158 beaut r. 

, . . He has, I know not what, 

Of greatness in his looks, and of high fate, 

That almost awes me. — Drydex. 

6 The glare of outward beauty is soon darkened, but 
there is a beauty foreshadowing itself in the grace of 
action and feeling which the more the mind is used 
to, the more it chooses to rest on it.' 

' It is said the spirit's beauty cannot be shut within 
as you would shut the diamond in its casket, hiding 
all its light ; but that the radiance illuminating the 
inner temple will spread itself over the face proclaim- 
ing to all who come near ' here dwells an angel.' 

A wicked heart — covered toith silver dross. 

. . . Your thief looks in the crowd, 

Exactly like the rest, or rather better ; 

'Tis only at the bar, or in the dungeon, 

That wise men know your felon by his features. — Byron. 

22. Types. — She to higher hopes 

Was destined, in a finer mould was wrought, 

And tempered with a purer, brighter flame. — Akenside. 

The dove is universally allowed to be one of the 
most beautiful objects in nature. The brilliancy of 
her plumage, the splendor of her eye, the innocence 
of her look, the excellence of her disposition, and 
the purity of her manners have been the theme of 
admiration in every age. To the snowy whiteness 
of her wings, and the rich golden hues that adorn 
her neck, the inspired Psalmist alludes in most elegant 
strains. She is the chosen emblem of simplicity, 



TYPES. 159 

gentleness, chastity, and feminine timidity, and for 
this reason, as well as for their abounding in the 
East, they were chosen as offerings to Jehovah.' 

. . . the wings of a dove covered with silver, 
and her feathers with yellow gold. 

The Rose. — ' In native white and red, 
The rose and lily stand, 
And* free from pride their beauties spread, 
To show thy skillful hand.' 

True, you were not made to be a great, coarse sun- 
flower, nor a full Provence-rose, but to be a beautiful, 
little Scotch rose — to show the world that God could 
plant such beautiful flowers on the bleak mountains 
and in the misty valleys of Scotland — a great rose 
condensed into a miniature one— as if to show how 
much that is beautiful can be put into a very small 
space. Again, you complain of the heat of noon, — 
the very time when the strong light is falling on you, 
and painting your face with colors which nothing 
but the noon-day sun could possibly bestow. If you 
want your glorious colors, you must have the hot 
pencil of the sun paint them. — Todd. 

Thy emblem, gracious queen, the British rose, 
Type of sweet rule and gentle majesty. — Pkioe. 

Hannah More. — There was an air of graceful, un- 
affected ease : an instinctive regard to the most deli- 
cate proprieties of social intercourse ; a readiness to 
communicate ; and yet a desire to lessen the dignity 



160 THE IDEAL UNION. 

of conscious merit, united with the humility of the 
devoted Christian : in short there was such an assem- 
blage of intellectual and moral excellences beaming 
forth in every expresssion, and look, and attitude, 
that I could scarcely conceive of a more perfect ex- 
hibition of human character. 

23. Everywhere womanhood is standing up our 
equal. We are finding out by slow degrees the old 
law of God ; we are getting back to the old truths of 
childhood. As of old in Eden manhood and woman- 
hood are being wed anew — wed in dignified equality 
as high help-meets in the work of the world. — Ec- 
lectic. 

He fashioneth their hearts alike. — 

Look to God for 'that divine, celestial welding that 
shall make you goldenly one. The perfect ideal love 
and heart union, is that which takes place, when two 
minds are bound together that have respectively the 
capacity to give to the whole of each other's mind 
appropriate stimulus and gratification. — Beecher. 

' The attraction which is the basis of this union is 
of a compound character, connecting with it some of 
the highest and most ennobling virtues of w/iich 
human nature is capable.' 

Mrs. U. Judson. — His discerning eye saw the slum- 
bering traits of noble missionary character, while her 
delicate and beautiful genius ran through a larger 
compass of correspondences to his versatile and 
many-sided nature, than that of either of her prede- 



THE JUDSOXS. 161 

cessors. Ann Hasseltine more than met all the de- 
mand of his earlier years of youthful and heroic ac- 
tion. Sarah Boerdman shed the light of one of the 
most exquisite of womanly natures over the calmer 
scenes of his manhood. Emily, with a heroism not 
less devoted, with a womanliness not less pure and 
gentle, met his ripe culture, his keen intellectuality, 
his imaginative and poetic temperament, with a rich- 
ness and variety of endowments which belonged to 
neither of these admirable women. — Kexdrick. 

The fervid, burning eloquence, the deep pathos, 
the touching tenderness, the elevation of thought, 
the intense beauty of expression which characterized 
these private teachings were not only beyond what 
I had ever heard before, but such as I feel sure sur- 
prized himself. — E. Judson. 

The Old. — The higher the civilization, the more 
nearly is companionship of the sexes reached. The 
highest civilization is yet to come, and with it such 
companionship in its completeness we may first look 
for it here ; for though we are the newest of nations, 
we have done more than any other to discard old and 
pernicious traditions. The land of chivalry, in a 
truer and better sense than the knights-errant were 
capable of understanding, has long been in this re- 
public, though our future is doomed to shame our 
present, and excite emulation elsewhere. 

The German, who is our remote ancestor, has no 
pleasures from which women are shut out, and he is 



162 WOMEN AS COMPANIONS. 

one of the most domestic, honest, and composed of 
mortals. Lineage moves in cycles ; we are going 
back by degrees to the customs of our progenitors. 
We see the influence of Teutonic habits upon our 
own people already, and we take kindly to the exam- 
ples of our own race. 

We Americans require the social element in our 
diversions, which are very melancholy in the main. 
We need enjoyment, instead of excitement, solace 
instead of selfishness, comfort instead of intensity. 

We want quiet talk (or pleasant silence), careless 
repose, the assurance of sympathy, gentle stimulants : 
not boisterous speech, impertinent egotism, restless 
repression, coarse stories, vulgar profanity, and fiery 
potations. 

Before the present century has passed, our dissi- 
pations will be restored, I predict, to the significance 
of recreations. Women will be our partners in them, 
and they will bring new tastes, new desires, new at- 
mospheres, and by their wholesome presence and ex- 
quisite tact will transform us into finer creatures 
than have been reflected even from the mirror of our 
vanity. Companionship will have rendered the sexes 
just, conscientious, truthful to each other ; will have 
taken flippant flattery from the lip and put cordial 
appreciation in the mind ; will have substituted 
voices for echoes, purposes for words, aspirations for 
assumptions. Companionship will have served as 
instruction, reason, and intuition. — Browne. 



WOMAN AT HES BEST. 163 

Buckle. — The influence of his mother led him to 
value the mental sympathy and companionship of 
women. He had a keen appreciation of what their 
peculiar intellectual quality should do for society. 
His extreme gentleness combined with power made 
him a favorite. — Tribune. 

Womanly women are very kindly critics, except to 
themselves, and now and then to their own sex. The 
less there is of sex about a woman the more she is to 
be dreaded. But take a real woman at her best mo- 
ment — well dressed enough to be pleased with herself, 
not so resplendent as to be a show and a sensation, 
with the varied outside influences that set vibrating 
the harmonic notes of her nature stirring in the air 
about her — and what has social life to compare with 
one of those vital interchanges of thought and feeling 
with her that makes an hour memorable ? What can 
equal her tact, her delicacy, her subtlety of apprehen- 
sion-, her quickness to feel the changes of temperature 
as the warm and cool currents of thought blow by 
turns ? At one moment she is microscopically intel- 
lectual, critical, scrupulous in judgment as an ana- 
lyst's balance : and in the next as sympathetic as the 
open rose, that sweetens the wind from whatever 
quarter it finds its way to her bosom. It is in the 
hospitable soul of a woman that a man forgets he is a 
stranger, and so becomes natural and truthful, at the 
same time that he is mesmerized by all those divine 
differences which make her a mystery and bewilder- 
ment. — Hol:^ 



164 SUPERIOR BEINGS. 

1 Her fair soul like scent of flowers unseen 
Sweetens the turmoil of long centuries.' 

The truly great are always good. You used to 
say that talents were always formidable. I think not 
so. Superior beings are necessarily benignant ; they 
guide us and guard us, not like the jostling of a mob, 
but by a guiding, invisible influence. I never fear 
a great man, I only fear and hate what the slang of 
the world calls a clever man ; that is, generally, a 
pert, half-wise man. In the other sex the women 
who bear sway over the generality of minds, are 
called accomplished and beautiful women ; they are 
like those half-wise men, generally thought formid- 
able : they are to me very great objects of terror, just 
as self-conceit and bad dispositions are terrible ! But 
let me see the woman who is truly admirable, and I 
fancy the most shy and ungainly admirer of female 
excellence, like myself, will be very much at his ease 
and destitute of all fear and diffidence in her pre- 
sence. The truly beautiful, the truly wise, the truly 
good do not abash the most retiring. The friend- 
ship of wise men — the sentiments with which I have 
regarded my real heroines convince me of this. — 
Thomas Cambpell. 

She comprehended for the first time, how sweet a 
thing it is to develop, reveal, express one's self in 
the presence of a great soul that measures with an 
appreciating, admiring and loving eye, every utter- 
ance and every power. — Holland. 



APPRECIATION. 165 

6 Great natures are never injured by appreciation 
and preference : even when frankly and openly ex- 
pressed. On the contrary, they are encouraged by 
it and grow nobler : nor do they ever misunderstand 
it. It is only the petty, inferior mind which puts a 
wrong construction on such regard, and wounds 
us by its vanity and self-conceit.' 

. . . Modest doubt is called 

The beacon of the wise. — Shakespeare. 

26. That renowned champion, Sir Bertrand Du 
Guesclin, was one of the prisoners at Poictiers. One 
day, when Queen Philippa was entertaining at her 
court a number of the noble French prisoners, the 
prince of Wales proposed that Du Guesclin should 
name his own ransom, according to the etiquette of 
the times, adding that whatever sum he mentioned, 
be it small or great, should set him free. The 
valiant Breton valued himself at one hundred thousand 
crowns ; the prince of Wales started at the immense 
sum and asked Sir Bertrand how he could ever ex- 
pect to raise such an enormous rans<sm? ' I know,' 
replied the hero, ' a hundred knights in my native 
Bretagne who would mortgage their last acre rather 
than Du Guesclin should either lanquish in prison, 
or be rated below his value. Yea, and there is not a 
woman in Prance now toiling at her distaff who 
would not devote a year's earnings to set me free, 
for well have I deserved of their sex. And if all the 



166 du guesclin's valuation. 

fair spinners of Prance employ their hands to redeem 
me, think you, prince, whether I shall bide much 
longer with you ? ' Queen Philippa, who had listened 
with great attention to the discussion, now spoke. 
' I name,' she said, 'fifty thousand crowns, my son, 
as my contribution toward your gallant prisoner's 
ransom : for though an enemy to my husband, a 
knight who is famed for the courteous attention he 
has afforded to my sex deserves the assistance of 
every woman.' — Miss Strickland. 

' Give us a man, young or old, high or low, on whom 
we know that we can thoroughly depend, who will 
stand firm when others fail, the friend faithful and 
true, the adviser honest and fearless, the adversary 
just and chivalrous ; in such an one there is a frag- 
ment of the Rock of Ages, — a sign that there has 
been a prophet among us.' 

If you are so favored as to have a friend worthy 
the name, whose eye brightens and whose heart re- 
plenishes yours, in whose nature you find the com- 
plement and touch the equilibrium of your own, that 
is a very different affair. — Alger. 

I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so 
real and equal that I may drop even those undermost 
garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second- 
thought which men never put off, and may deal with 
him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one 
chemical atom meets another. — Emerson. 

Great souls know each other. Years are the servi- 



FREE-MASONRY. 167 

tors of slower natures, and nurse men into mutual 
confidences. There are certain touches that fine 
natures know instantly conclusive of all the rest — the 
free-masonry of the sons of God. — Beecher. 

For let the swaying, surging hosts throughout the 
valley deliver* themselves as they can from the con- 
fusion of tongues, the wanderers among the moun- 
tains ought to understand the signals they see flar- 
ing from crag and gorge and pinnacle. — Atlantic 
Monthly. 

1 Thy sunlike soul my weary way hath lighted, 

Speaking in silence through thy life to mine. — Burleigh 

27. If your friend has displeased you, you shall 
not sit down to consider it, for lie has already 
lost all memory of the passage, and has doubled his 
power to serve you, and ere you can rise up again 
will burden you with blessings. — Emerson. 

And to be wroth with one we love 

Doth work like madness in the brain. — Coleridge. 

Every man's experience must teach him that 
quarrels between friends are best healed when they 
are healed most promptly. The alienation which 
was at first a pain, becomes by time habitual ; and 
the mantle of charity being withdrawn, the faults of 
each become more and more distinct to the other, 
and thus the bitterest hates spring from the ashes 
of the closest friendship. — Davis. 

Charles Dickens relates this touching story of 
Douglas Jerrold. Of his generosity, I had a proof 



168 ESTRANGEMENT. 

within these two or three years which it saddens me 
to think of now. There had been estrangement be- 
tween us — not involving angry words, and a good 
many months had passed without my ever seeing 
him in the streets ; when it fell out that we dined 
each with his own separate party in the stranger's 
room of the club. Our chairs were almost back to 
back, and I took mine after he was seated, and at 
dinner (I am sorry to remember), and- did not look 
that way. Before we had sat long, he openly wheeled 
his chair round, stretched out both hands in an en- 
gaging manner, and said aloud with a bright and 
loving face that I can see as I write to you : ' Let us 
be friends again. A life is not long enough for this/ 

c A more glorious victory cannot be gained over a 
man, than when an injury begins on his part, kind- 
ness should begin on ours.' 

How long must the sinner call upon God before he 
sees the smile of Love making bright the heavens, 
glad the earth, possible all blessing ? For he hath 
built no walls, fastened no bars, blasted no present, 
cursed no future. 

If love be large, rich, free, strong enough, it brings 
itself with one bound into the heavenly kingdom, 
where the Powers of Darkness had well nigh pre- 
vailed. — Atlantic Monthly. 

28. What is my beloved more than another? 

Your friend, who shall describe him, or worthily 
paint what he is to you ? No merchant or lawyer, 



THE DIFFERENCE. 169 

nor farmer nor statesman claims your suffrage, but a 
kingly soul. He comes to you from God — a prophet, 
a seer, a revealer. He has a clear vision. His love 
is reverence. He goes into the penetralia of your 
life, not presumptuously, but with uncovered head, 
unsandalled feet ; and pours libations at the inner- 
most shrine. His incense is grateful. A golden 
glow suffuses your atmosphere. A vague, fine ec- 
stasy thrills to the sources of life, and earth lays 
hold on heaven. Such friendship is worship. You 
only know that your whole being bows with humility 
and utter thankfulness to him who thus crowns you 
monarch of all realms. 

You go back into your solitudes : all is silent as 
aforetime, but you cannot forget that a voice once 
resounded there. — Gail Hamilton. 

' As one entranced will sometimes gaze afar 

Into the deep blue night, 
At the sweet radiance of some special star 

That shines supremely bright ; 
His look concentred — all the rest unrecked, 

Their glowing courses run ; 
Though by ten myriad gems the heavens are decked, 

To him there is but one. 

So I look up into a glorious face, 
Into a calm, kind eye, 

Radiant with queenly nobleness an grace- 
Clear as a cloudless sky. 

Not bright as brooks that o'er the shallows roll, 
But oh, so pure and deep, 
8 



170 STEADFAST. 

With fathomless serenity of soul, 
Like ocean in a sleep ! 

There might be faces fifty times as fair, 

Oh, dear loved lady mine ! 
But though there were, I'd neither know nor care ; 

Pm blind to all but thine.' 

4 There is, there has ever been but one voice for me. 
For answer the organist lifted the lid of the artist's 
piano, touched a few notes and sang. Was that the 
voice that once brought out the applause of the 
people rushing and roaring like the waves of the sea ? 
The same etherealized, strengthened, meeting the de- 
sire of the trained and cultured man, as once it had 
the impassioned aspiration of youth. He stood there 
as of old completely subject to her will ; and of old she 
had worked for good, as one of God's accredited an- 
gels. Every evil passion in those days had stood -re- 
buked before the charmed circle ot her influences : 
a voice to long for as the hart longs for the water- 
brooks ; a spirit to trust for work, or for love, or for 
truth, — ' truest truth ' and stanches't loyalty, as one 
might trust those who are delivered forever from the 
power of temptation. — The eyes so large and blue : 
the lips with their story of firm courage and true 
genius, so grand in calm. A figure however not 
likely to attract the many, but whom it held for once 
it held forever. — Atlantic Monthly. 

30. Leave to the diamond its ages to grow, nor 
expect to accelerate the births of the eternal. He 



LAWS OP FELLOWSHIP. 171 

only is fit for this society who is magnanimous, who is 
sure that greatness and goodness are always economy ; 
who is not swift to intermeddle with his fortunes. 
Reverence is a great part of it. Treat your friend as 
a spectacle. Let us buy our entrance to this guild by 
a long probation : Respect so far the holy laws of this 
fellowship, as not to prejudice its perfect flower by 
your impatience for its opening. We must be our 
own before we can be another's. The least defect of 
self-possession vitiates the entire relation. There can 
never be deep peace between you, never mutual re- 
spect, until in their duality, each stands for the entire 
world. — Emerson. 

Wait, and Love himself will bring 
The drooping flower of knowledge 

Changed to fruit of wisdom. 

Wait, my faith is large in time, 
And that which shapes it to some perfect end. 

— Tennyson. 

I am not sure that the ladies understand the full 
value of the influence of absence. Distance, in truth, 
produces in idea the same effect as in real perspec- 
tive. Objects are softened and rounded, and render- 
ed doubly graceful ; the harsher and more ordinary 
points of character are mellowed down, and those by 
which it is remembered are the more striking out- 
lines that mark sublimity, grace or beauty. There 
are mists to dim the mental as well as the natural 
horizon, to conceal what is less pleasing in distant 



172 REAL PERSPECTIVE. 

objects: and there are happy lights to stream in full 
glory upon those points which can profit by brilliant 
illumination. — Walter Scott. 

The hues of the opal, the light of the diamond, are 
not to be seen if the eye is too near. Let us carry 
it with what grandeur of spirit we can. — Emerson. 

* And still my fancy paints you near, 
Though all the room is lone and bare, 

And off at eventide I hear 

Your phantom footstep on the stair. 

A presence in the gathering gloom, 
Thrills all my pulses with delight, 

And seems to glorify the room, 
With loveliness denied my sight. 

Friendship, — A ruddy drop of manly blood 
The suro-inor sea outweighs ; 
The world uncertain comes and goes, 
The rooted lover stays. 

I fancied he was fled, 

And after many a year, 
Glowed unexhausted kindliness, 

Like daily sunrise there. 

My careful heart was free again, 

O friend, my bosom said, 
Through thee alone the sky is arched, 

Through thee the rose is red. 

All things through thee take nobler form 

And look beyond the earth : 
The mill-round of our fate appears 

A sun-path in thy worth. 



FRIENDSHIP. 173 

Me too thy nobleness hath blessed 

To master my despair, 
The fountains of thy sudden life, 

Are through thy friendship fair. — Emerson. 

If the eternal ray, that heavenly was, 
To no false earthly fire be reconciled, 
The drop shall mingle with its native main, 
The ray shall meet its kindred ray again. 

— Mrs. Hemaxs. 

Oh ! in that future let us think 

To hold each heart the heart that shares, 
With them the immortal waters drink, 

And, soul in soul, grow deathless theirs. — Byron. 

2. September — Oh fairest month of all the year ! 

Oh, sweetest days in life ! they meet 
Within, without, is autumn clear, 
September here, September there, 
So tranquil and so sweet ! 

Oft have I watched all night with grief, 
All night with joy, and which is best? 
Ah, both were sharp, and both were brief, 
My heart was like a wind-blown leaf; 
I give them both for rest. — Spencer. 

The sultry summer past, September comes, 

Soft twilight of the slow declining year, 

More sober than the buxom, blooming May, 

And therefore less the favorite of the world ; 

But dearest month of all to pensive minds. — Wilcox. 

September ! There are thoughts in thy heart of 
death. Thou art doing a secret work, and heaping 
up treasures for another year. The unborn infant- 



174 SEPTEMBER. 

buds which thou art tending are more than all the 
living leaves. Thy robes are luxuriant, but worn 
with softened pride. More dear, less beautiful than 
June, thou art the heart's month. Thy hands are 
stretched out, and clasp the glowing palm of August, 
and the fruit-sending hand of October. Thou divid- 
est them asunder, and art thyself molded of them 
both. — Beecher. 

1 Thou hast a token in the sky, 
A music in thy wandering winds, 

A strength in thy maturity 
In which the soul a solace finds/ 

3. Happiness consists in the multiplicity of agree- 
able consciousness. There is nothing, Sir, too little 
for so little a creature as man. It is by studying 
little things that we attain the great art of having 
as little misery and as much happiness as possible. 
Pound St. Paul's church into atoms and consider 
any single atom ; it is to be sure, good for nothing : 
but put all these atoms together and you have St 
Paul's church. — Johnson. 

Miss Sedgewick writes of the poor peasantry of 
Europe that ' a very little suffices to make them hap- 
py. A thoughtful, serious view of past, present and 
future is not theirs.' 

' Men should be intelligent and earnest. They 
must also make us feel that they have a controlling, 
happy future opening before them, whose early twi- 
lights already kindle in the passing hour.' 



HAPPINESS. 175 

4. Refinement. — The effect of a frame or stone 
house is immense on the tranquility, power and refine- 
ment of the builder. A man in a cave, or in a camp, 
a nomad will die with no more of an estate than the 
wolf or the horse leaves. But so simple a labor as a 
house being achieved, his chief enemies are kept at 
bay. He is safe from the teeth of wild animals, from 
frost, sun-stroke and weather ; and fine faculties be- 
gin to yield their fine harvest. Invention and art 
are born ; manners, and social beauty, and delight. 
— Emerson. 

. . . Spirits are not finely 
Touched but to fine issues. — Shakespeare. 
Wealth. — ' M}- mind to me a kingdom is/ 

The pleasure of thought to a well-directed mind, 
the pleasure of sensible communion with the higher 
world, and even the delectations of a chastened im- 
agination, have in reality more and stronger attrac- 
tions, than anything to be afforded by caterers to 
voluptuousness. Will not this reality yet open 
upon the human mind, to turn it away from the out- 
ward, however gorgeous, magnificent, and seductive? 
— Church. 

6. Your brethren that hated you, that cast you out 
for my name's sake said, Let the Lord be glorified. 

The severest part of self-denial consists in en- 
countering the disapprobation, the envy, the hatred 
of one's dearest friends. All who enter the straight 
and narrow path in good earnest, soon find them- 



176 THE NARROW PATH. 

selves in a climate extremely uncongenial to the 
growth of pride. — Judson. 

Cast thy heart firmly upon the Lord, and fear not 
the judgment of man, when conscience testitieth of 
thy dutifulness and innocency. They that to-day 
take thy part, to-morrow may be against thee, and 
often do they turn right round like the wind. Put all 
thy trust in God ; let Him be thy fear ; he shall answer 
for thee and will do in all things what is best for thee. 

7. I have also holy books for my comfort and for 
the glass of my life. — Kempis. 

1 My life, this lovely human life, 
Has more than purple splendor, 
And kingly guests come day by day, 
Their kingly gifts to render.' 

4 The scholar only knows how dear these silent yet 
eloquent companions of pure thoughts and innocent 
hours become in the season of adversity. When all 
that is worldly turns to dross around us, these retain 
their steady value. When friends grow cold and the 
converse of intimates languishes into vapid civility 
and common place, these only continue the unaltered 
countenance of happier days and cheer us with that 
true friendship which never deceived hope nor de- 
serted sorrow.' 

Athens. — Who shall say how many thousands have 
been made wiser, happier, and better by those pur- 
suits in which she has taught mankind to engage ; 
to how many the studies which took their rise from 



LITERATURE. 177 

her have been wealth in poverty — liberty in bondage, 
— health in sickness, — society in solitude. Her 
power is indeed manifested in the bar, in the senate, 
in the field of battle, in the schools of philosophy. 
But these are not her glory. Wherever literature 
consoles sorrow, or assuages pain, — wherever it brings 
gladness to eyes which fail with wakefulness and 
tears and ache for the dark house and the long sleep, 
— there is exhibited in its noblest form the immortal 
influence of Athens. — Macaulay. 

9. The wild beasts of the desert shall also meet with 
the wild beasts of the island, and the satyr shall. cry 
to his fellow, the screech owl also shall rest there ; and 
find, for herself a place of rest. There shall the great 
owl make her nest, and lay, and hatch, and gather 
under her shadow. There shall the vultures also be 
gathered, every one with her mate. Seek ye out of the 
book of the Lord and read, no one of these shall fail, 
of none shall want her mate. 

Lone flower that blooms amid the wild, 
To breathe thy fragrance and to die, 
Even unknown by mortal eye, 

Sweet prairie child ! 

Lone star that spangles midnight pall, 
Lone bird that in the woodland sings, 
Lone rill that from the rock-vein springs, 
God sees ye all ! 

Lone soul that toils in earth's great wild, 
To weep and sigh and thus depart, 

8* 



178 DIVINE SYMPATHY. 

Uncared for by one human heart — 

Truth's martyr child ! 

Thy tears are dew drops God doth kiss, 
Thy sighs are perfumes angels breathe 
From garland's woven by love that wreathe 

The saints in bliss. — Bulkley. 

"What human heart has ever found a sympathy 
that satisfied it either in Nature or in man ? After 
all these afford, there remains a deep and painful 
craving that pleads, from time to time, for a sympa- 
thy that is higher, richer, and more complete. The 
morg there is of culture and refinement, and espe- 
cially the more of the finer endowments of genius, 
the intenser this conscious want. It is in truth the 
godlike going out after the Divine and Infinite, to 
which it is allied : and if by unbelief the soul be ren- 
dered incapable of finding this, the result is inward 
restlessness, and sometimes a deep and habitual 
wretchedness. One cannot read the writings of such 
a man as Shelley, for example, without constantly 
perceiving that with all his wealth of intellect and 
imagination, and his exquisite perceptions of the 
beautiful, his heart was tortured by longings for sym- 
pathetic responses which he utterly failed to find in 
human society, in the natural world, or in his own 
ideals. But let one who has sought elsewhere for 
sympathy and has not found it, at last find God and 
come into a conscious fellowship with him, and the 
case is altogether different. To the reality and the 



DIVINE SYMPATHY. 179 

tenderness of God's sympathy Trith those that love 
him, the entire Scriptures, and the best Christian 
experience alike bear testimony. By Christ in whom 
dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily, the 
sympathy of mutual love, and personal living contact 
and communion is positively pledged as the grand 
encouragement of faithful disciples. It has never 
disappointed. More intimate and complete than any 
sympathy with creatures, it has proved immeasur- 
ably rich and sweet, it is a commingling of the divine 
and the human affections to which no parallel exists. 
The inexpressible desires which Nature and man 
leave yearning still find in it all of love, and tender- 
ness and spiritual intercommunication that are re- 
quired to fill them perfectly. Our communion is 
with the Father and His son Jesus Christ. — Palmer. 
A trembling feeling of a Presence comes upon me 
at times which makes inward solitariness a trifle to 
talk about. — Robertson. 

' My Saviour, come abide with me to-night, 

My only Guest ! 
My loneliness to thee, I need not tell, 

O, give me rest ! ' 

How shall I bring thee into my house, I that have 
so often offended thy most benign countenance ? 
What meaneth this so gracious condescension ? Lord, 
how often shall I resign myself and wherein shall I 
forsake myself? 

Always, and every hour ; as well in small things 



180 THE HEIGHT OF LIFE. 

as in great. I except nothing. Otliervn.se, how 
cans't thou be mine and I thine unless thou be strip- 
ped of all self-will and with entire simplicity follow 
Jesus only. Then shall all vain imaginations, evil 
perturbations and superfluous cares fly away. — Kem- 
pis. 

6 Wesley's experience, nurtured by habitual prayer 
and deepened by unwearied exertion in the cause of 
the Saviour, deepened into that steadfast faith and 
solid peace which the grace of God perfected in him 
to the close of his long and active life.' 

A Christian should possess such quietness and 
dignity of spirit, that resting in the consciousness of 
God's love and approval, he will not be greatly mov- 
ed by the applause or displeasure of his fellows. — 
Beecher. 

Leavitt. — He knew how to combine dignity with 
meekness, cheerfulness with submission, how to re- 
tain that personality which was the essence of his 
power ; how to nourish his soul with ideas, rather 
than to starve it with memories and regrets ; how to 
identify himself with God's purposes, and thus to live 
above the world ; and, most of all, how in the large- 
ness and the wealth of his own nature to separate him- 
self from mean men, so that, however their mean- 
nesses or detractions might accost the eye or the ear, 
they could not intrude within the sphere of his con- 
sciousness, so as to disturb his peace. — Thompson. 

One must remember that nothing can, without his 



CONTEMPLATION. 181 

consent, interpose between him and his soul's com- 
munion and life, that circumstances cannot take away 
the Supreme presence. — Mills. 

10. And he was transfigured before them. 

6 If ever on the Mount with thee, 
I seem to soar in vision bright, 
"With thoughts of coming agony, 
Stay thou the too presumptuous flight. 

Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of? 

Archbishop Leighton. — He reckoned the greater 
number of the regular clergy in Roman Catholic 
countries to be little better than — rapacious drones ; 
at the same time that he recognized among them a 
few specimens of extraordinary growth in religion ; 
and thought he had discovered in the piety of some 
conventual recluses, a peculiar and celestial flavor 
which could hardly be met with elsewhere. Of their 
sublime devotion he often spoke wilh an admiration 
approaching to rapture : and much he wished that the 
sons of a purer faith and discipline could match them 
in that seraphic strength and swiftness of wing, by 
which they soared to the topmost branches of divine 
contemplation, and cropped the choicest clusters of 
celestial fruitage. Would Christians retreat occa- 
sionally from the busy whirl and tumult of life, and 
give themselves time to think, they would become 
enamored of those beauties which lie above the natu- 
ral ken on the summit of God's holy mountain ! — 
Leighton's Biographer. 



182 HEAVEN. 

Heaven. Grod shall redeem my soul from the poicer 
of the grave, for he shall receive me. 

most blessed mansion of the city which is above ! 
most clear day of eternity which night obscureth 
not, but the highest truth ever enlighteneth ! day 
ever joyful, ever secure, and never changing into a 
contrary state. To the saints it shineth glowing 
with everlasting brightness, but to those that are 
pilgrims on the earth, it appeareth only afar off as it 
were through a glass darkly. — Kempis. 

Thine eyes shall see the King in his beauty, and 
thou shall behold the land that is afar off. 

As the bird to its sheltering nest, 

When the storm on the hills is abroad, 

So her spirit hath flown from this world of unrest, 
To repose on the bosom of God. — Burleigh. 

And to her was granted that she should be arrayed 
in fine linen, clean and ivhite,for the fine linen is the 
righteousness of saints. 

Does life appear miserable that gives thee oppor- 
tunities of earning such a reward ? Is death to be 
feared, that will carry thee to so happy an existence ? 
Think not man was made in vain, who has such an 
eternity reserved for him. — Spectator. 

1 The hour, the hour, the parting hour, 
That takes from this dark world the power, 
And lays at once the thorn and flower 

On the same withering bier, my soul ! 



HEAVEN. 183 

The hour that ends all earthly woes, 
And gives the wearied soul repose : 
How soft, how sweet, that last long close 
Of mortal hope and fear, my soul ! 

To feel we only sleep to rise 

In sunnier lands and fairer skies ; 

To bind again our broken ties 

In ever living love, my soul.' 

Who shall divell in thy holy hill ? He that walketh 
uprightly, and tvorketh righteousness, and speaheth 
the truth in his heart. 

1 Whose soul no vanity allures ! ' 

The capacity of being blessed in heaven resides in 
a character that is capable of receiving happiness 
through spiritual causations. — Beecher. 

Because I live ye shall live also. 

Christ, his life, his love, his principles, must be 
looked at with a steadier gaze, so that there may be 
a continued transformation into his likeness. Little 
habits of evil must be daily corrected, — for only by 
this culture of spiritual strength can the soul become 
strong enough to do battle with its mightier foes : 
— the last cloud passing away, the last stain washed 
out from the garments of the soul ; only when we 
come into the presence of Him who is light itself. — 
Beecher. 

Dwell thou with him, keeping. thy garments clean 

From earthly stain — thus living to his praise, 
Thou on some signal day with raptured vision / 



184 MORAL EMINENCE. 

Shall glide into the bliss of life elysian 

And see thy God. — Linthal. 

These are they who shall stand by the great white 
throne , who shall adorn the temple not made with 
hands, whose builder is God. 

14. I doubt if S. is not too innocent to become sub- 
limely excellent ; her heart is purity and kindness, 
her recollections are complacent, her wishes and in- 
tentions are all good. In such a mind conscience 
becomes effeminate for want of hard exercise. She 
is exempted from those revulsions of the heart ; that 
remorse, those self-indignant regrets, those impetu- 
ous convictions, which sometimes assist to scourge 
the mind away from its stationary habits into such 
region of daring and arduous virtue as it would never 
have reached, nor even thought of, but for this mighty 
impulse of pain. Witness Albany in Cecilia. Vehe- 
ment emotion, mortifying contrast, shuddering alarm 
sting the mind into an exertion of power it was 
unconscious of before and urge it on with restless 
velocity toward the attainment of that moral emi- 
nence short of which it would equally scorn and 
dread to repose. We fly from pain or terror more 
eagerly than we pursue good ; yet both these causes 
aid our advance. — Foster. 

I think of what thy life hath been — 
So pure and sweet though not serene — 
So toned by grief, that gently fell 
Like moonlight in a slumbering dell, 



KNOWLEDGE OF EVIL. 185 

Or far-off sound of chapel-bell, 
Faintly afloat through, forests dim, 
Or tremulous waves of vesper hymn. 
***** 
I thinK of what my life hath been — 
So small of good, so large of sin — 
So like a shore where ocean beats 
Forever, and the ospray greets 
The ghost-like mists with ghostly screams ; 
"Where angry tempests' lightning-gleams 
Much frequenter than sunbeams come. — Urxer. 

Wlierefore do I take my flesh in my teeth, and 
2nd my life in mine hand? Though he slay me, yet 
will I trust in him. 

That virtue which knows not the utmost that 
Vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but 
a blank virtue. He that can apprehend and consider 
Vice, with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and 
yet abstain and yet prefer that which is truly better, 
he is the true wayfaring Christian. — Miltox. 

The combat. — Jesus, when like ocean billows, 

Fierce temptations on me roll; 
When they sweep me to the breakers, 
Be the anchor of my soul. — Kennedy. 

Whoso looks well upon Great Grace's face, shall 
see those scars and cuts that shall easily give demon- 
stration of what I say. Yea, once 1 heard that he 
should say, and that when he was in the combat : 
1 We despaired even of life.' How did these sturdy 
rogues and their fellows make David groan, mourn, 



186 STRENGTH. 

and roar ! Yea, Heman and Hezekiah too, though 
champions in their day, were forced to bestir them 
when by these assaulted, and yet, notwithstanding, 
they had their coats soundly brushed by them. 
Peter upon a time would go try what he could do ; 
but though some do say of him that he is the Prince 
of the Apostles, they handled him so, that they made 
him at last afraid of a sorry girl. Besides, their king 
is at their whistle, he is never out of hearing, and if 
at any time they be put to the worst, he if possible 
comes in to help them, and of him it is said Job 41. 
— The sword of him that' lay eth at him cannot hold, 
spear, dart, nor harbegeon — esteemeth iron as straw, 
brass as rotten wood. The arrow cannot make him 
flee. Sling stones are turned with him into stubble ; 
he laugheth at the shaking of a spear. — Bunyan. 

Sorrow is knowledge ; they, who know the most, 
Must mourn the deepest o'er the fatal truth, 
The tree of knowledge is not that of life. 

Wait, till like me, your hopes are blighted — till 
Sorrow and shame are handmaids of your cabin ; 
Famine and poverty, your guests at table ; 
Despair, your bed-fellow — then rise, but not 
From sleep, and judge. — Bykon. 

17. Patient and collected souls come out of great 
trials girt with immortal strength. Such are able 
to wrestle, not simply against flesh and blood, but 
against principalities, against powers, against the 



DIVINER FRUIT. 187 

rulers of the darkness of this world, and against 
spiritual wickedness in the aerial regions. 

There is an inner circle of faith and brotherhood, 
occupied by those only who have been tried by fire. — 
Jenkins. 

Not only knowledge, but also every other gift, 
which we call the gifts of fortune, have power to puff 
up earth : afflictions only level those mole-hills of 
pride, plough the heart, and make it fit for wisdom 
to sow her seed, and for grace to bring forth her in- 
crease. — Bacon. 

Then the blows of time and fate will leave on our 
souls not disfiguring scars, but inserted buds, innoc- 
ulating us to bear diviner fruit. — Alger. 

While he thus indulged his grief, a clear and sol- 
emn voice, close beside him pronounced these words 
in the sonorous tone of the readers of the mosque : — 
Adversity is like the period of the former and of the 
latter rains, — cold, comfortless, unfriendly to man 
and to animal ; yet from thence come the flower and 
the fruit, the date, the rose, and the pomegranate. — 
W. Scott. 

For by the sadness of the countenance the heart is 
made better. 

18. Nothing better holds up the mirror to nature, 
than a letter from a competent pen, written in the 
fullest freedom of familiarity and the fervor of friend- 
ship. He puts on no airs, while he spontaneously 
does hisjjest. Letters, therefore, by men of parts to 



188 LETTER- WRITING. 

men whom they love and honor, are apt to reveal the 
highest reach of their genius.' 

Ike Marvel says, Blessed be letters : they are the 
monitors, they are also the comforters and they are 
the only true heart-talkers. Of conversation, he says, 
the truest thought is modified by a look, a sign, a 
sneer, a gesture. It is not individual, it is not inte- 
gral : it is social and mixed. It is not so with letters. 
In them your soul is measuring itself by itself; and 
saying its own sayings ; there are no sneers to modify 
its utterance, no scowl to scare : nothing is present 
but you and your thoughts.' 

19. What then is the charm, the irresistible charm 
of Walpole's writings ? It consists, we think, in the 
art of amusing without exciting. He never con- 
vinces the reason ; nor fills the imagination, nor 
touches the heart, but he keeps the mind of the 
reader constantly attentive and constantly enter- 
tained. His style is one of those peculiar styles by 
Which everybody is attracted, and which nobody can 
safely venture to imitate. No man who has written 
so much is so seldom tiresomQ. He rejects all but 
the attractive parts of his subject — no digressions, 
unreasonable descriptions, or long speeches. — Ma- 
caulay. 

Very few writers make an extraordinary figure in 
the world who have not something in their way of 
thinking or expressing themselves, that is peculiar to 
them, and entirely their own. — Spectator. 



ORIGINALITY. 189 

Insist on yourself: never imitate. Your own gift 
you can present every moment with the cumulative 
force of a whole life's cultivation ; but of the adopted 
talent of another you have only an extemporaneous 
half-possession. That which each can do best, none 
but his Maker can teach him. No man yet knows 
what it is, nor can, till that person has exhibited it. 
"Where is the master who could have taught Shakes- 
peare ? Where is the master who could have in- 
structed Franklin, or Washington, or Bacon, or 
Newton ? Every great man is a unique. — Emerson. 

Thomson. — As a writer, he is entitled to one praise 
of the highest kind : his mode of thinking and ex- 
pressing his thoughts is original. His blank verse is 
no more the blank verse of Milton, or of any other 
poet, than the rhymes of Prior are the rhymes ot 
Cowley. His numbers, his pauses, his diction are of 
his own growth, without transcription, without imi- 
tation. He thinks in a peculiar train, and he thinks 
always as a man of genius : he looks round on Na- 
ture and on Life, with an eye which Nature bestowed 
only on a poet, the eye which distinguishes in every- 
thing presented to its view, whatever there is on 
which imagination can delight to be detained, and 
with a mind that at once comprehends the vast, and 
attends to the minute. The reader of the Seasons 
wonders that he never saw before what Thomson 
shows him, and that he never yet has felt what 
Thomson impresses. — Johnson. 



190 a preacher's power. 

Robertson preserved his independence of thought. 
He had a strong idiosyncrasy, and he let it loose 
within the bounds of law, — a law not imposed upon 
him from without by another, but freely chosen by 
himself as the best. He developed, without reject- 
ing the help of others, his own character after his 
own fashion. He respected his own conscience, be- 
lieved in his own native force, and in the divine fire 
within him. He endeavored to receive, without the 
intervention of commentators, immediate impressions 
from the Bible. To these impressions he added the 
individual life of his own heart, and his knowledge 
of the life of the great world. He preached these 
impressions, and with a freedom, independence, va- 
riety, and influence which were the legitimate chil- 
dren of his individuality. That men should, within 
the necessary limits, follow out their own character, 
and refuse to submit themselves to the common 
mould, is the foremost need of the age in which we 
live. — Brooke. 

For we cannot but speak the things which we have 
seen and heard. 

20. The one serious and formidable thing in na- 
ture is a will. Society is servile from want of will. 
— Emerson. 

The majority of men in every age are superficial 
in character, and brittle in purpose : swarming to- 
gether in buzzing crowds, in all haunts of amuse- 
jnent, or places of low competition, caring little for 



A LESSON OF POVERTY. 191 

anything but low gossip of pastime, the titillation of 
the senses, and the gratification of conceit. To state 
the conditions and illustrate the attractions of a 
holier and grander happiness, — to hold up the exam- 
ples of nobler characters and lives, lifted into some- 
thing of loneliness by their gifts and achievements — 
is accordingly always a timely service. All better 
lives are so much redeeming leaven kneaded into the 
lump of humanity. — Alger. 

When the Romans erected a statue to Cato in the 
Temple of Health, they made upon it no allusion to 
his victories, but this was the inscription : 4 In honor 
of Cato, the Censor, who, when the Commonwealth 
was degenerating into licentiousness, by good disci- 
pline and wise institutions restored it.' Mr. Stanton, 
having taught a great lesson in his life, has taught 
another in his death. He took upon himself, it 
seems, long since, not only the knightly vow of cou- 
rage, but the other knightly vow of poverty. Hav- 
ing controlled a national expenditure of two millions 
a day, he died at last and left his children poor. In 
those countries where statesmanship means selfish- 
ness, this fact alone would prove him no statesman. 
He would seem to deserve the reproach inflicted by 
the European statesman on his subordinate — ' You 
are unskilled in the art of fishing in so vast an ocean 
as the pockets of a hundred million people.' — Tri- 
bune. 

At the time when Mr. Stanton took the War Office 



192 AN OFFICIAL WILL. 

the country lay in the gentle and complying temper 
of great officials ; the corrupting influences brought 
to bear upon their personal sensibilities ; the con- 
cessions made to private claims and impulses at a 
moment when the opportunities to office and the op- 
tional reading of its rules by officials involved the 
making and losing of vast fortunes for others ; when 
banks, railroad companies, corporations of all kinds, 
and factories and industrial interests of all sorts, 
were by those agents, besieging every department of 
the Government, and using every kind of personal 
wheedling, and straining every partisan and political 
nerve to save themselves from ruin, or to avail them- 
selves of some connection with the vast expenditures 
of the Government to make their fortunes. He was 
beset alike by the smothering assiduities of the phil 
anthropic, the unnerving counsels of the timid, the 
hypocritical proffers of the greedy and the selfish, 
the insidious claims of personal partiality, the band- 
ed conspiracies of industrial corporations or class-in- 
terests, the pushing of practiced partisan cliques, the 
overriding of Congressional committees, the abuse 
of portions of the public press, the imperfect sym- 
pathy of colleagues, the antecedents of the War Office, 
with the bureaus headed by veteran red tapists, totter- 
ing with decorous formality through duties which 
required the expansive enthusiasm of hopeful youth 
and teachable manhood — the wide-eyed vision of men 
born of the great hour. 



IRON MAIL — TENDER HEART. 193 

Were we to anticipate the manners of Sir Charles 
Grandison, in the man who was to fill a station like 
this at an hour like that ? Not Cerberus himself at 
the gate of Hades or the mouth of Acheron needed 
the deep growl, the snarling teeth or the many heads 
that kept the imprisoned shades in hell, more than 
the Secretary needed them all to keep imposters, 
thieves, cowards, and bad advisers out of the War 
Department, which lead by a short avenue to the 
Treasury, and by both paths to the breaking heart of 
the nation. 

Beneath Mr. Stanton's robust and stern bosom 
dwelt a softness and gentleness of heart which made 
him the idol of his home and the object of a passion- 
ate devotion from his personal friends. His exter- 
nal manners were but the rough rind of his tender 
heart. Rather than against others, he protected 
himself against himself, the relentings of his gentle 
spirit, the perilous softenings of his soul by the iron 
mail of a brusque and cold carriage. Mr. Lincoln ! 
Let his name never be publicly named without honor 
and reverence, had not a gentler heart, and it was 
their common tenderness that melted them together 
and made them one through the war. But Mr. 
Stanton had a higher mark of greatness because of 
a diviner type — sadness — the sadness of souls that 
feel all the loneliness of their unshared responsibi- 
lity ; the greatness of their ideal shaming their best 
accomplishments ; their yearning for sympathy back- 
9 



194 PERSONAL CHARACTER. 

ed by the necessary, unconquerable superiority and 
elevation of their views, so that they are dwarfed by 
the distance they leave others behind them, and 
made solitary and lonely by the height they attain. 

The President was plowed and furrowed with sor- 
row till his face looked like a sea after a storm when 
the winds are hushed, but the waves still roll, and the 
gray clouds make them leaden and sad. But Mr. 
Stanton's sadness was that of the midnight embers, 
which shows fire slumbering beneath the ashes — 
ashes which disappointment, griefs, misunderstand- 
ings, abuse, delays, have heaped up, but which, gray 
and silent, hide unconquerable flames in their bosom. 

He was as clear and prompt and all-knowing and 
omnipotent as Mr. Stewart is in his mercantile 
establishment. But all his patience of details, his 
untiring energy and ceaseless labors would have been 
of little avail without the personal character he 
brought to the work. Temperate in the extreme he 
seemed to live from meat and drink unlike that of 
other men and to keep his body under with almost 
saintly rigor. He w r orked when he could not eat, 
and his invalid hours seemed equal to other men's 
best. Just so long as the country and the cause re- 
quired him, he was equal to anything and everything, 
and postponed sickness, weariness, and almost self- 
consideration of any kind to the hour when he would 
not be missed. To his pure hands, up to the arm- 
pits in the national wealth, there did not stick trai- 
torous one piece of silver. — Bellows. 



A PLAIN ALLEGORY. 195 

We have just been reading that simple butwonder- 
ful piece oi autobiography entitled : ' Grace abound- 
ing to the chief of sinners.' More earnest words 
were never written. It is the entire unveiling of a 
human heart, the tearing off of the fig-leaf covering 
of its sin. The voice which speaks to us from these 
old pages seems not so much that of a denizen of the 
world in which we live, as that of a soul at the last sol- 
emn confessional. Shorn of all ornament, simple and 
direct as the contrition and prayer of childhood, when 
for the first time the Spectre of Sin stands by its bed- 
side ; the style is that of a man dead to self-gratifica- 
tion, careless of the world's opinion, and only desirous 
to convey to others, in all truthfulness and sincerity, 
the lesson of his inward trials, temptations, sins, weak- 
nesses, and dangers ; and to give glory to Him who 
had mercifully led him through all, and enabled him 
like his own Pilgrim to leave behind the valley of 
the Shadow of Death, the Snares of the Enchanted 
Ground, and the terrors of Doubting Castfe, and to 
reach the Land of Beulah, where the air was sweet 
and pleasant, and the birds sang, and the flowers 
sprang up around him, and the Shining Ones walked 
in the brightness of the not distant Heaven. 

He gives no dates ; he affords scarcely a clew to 
his localities ; of the man, as he worked, and ate, and 
drank, and lodged ; of his neighbors and contempo- 
raries, of all he saw and heard, of the world about 
him, we have only an occasional glimpse here and 



196 ETERNITY AND ' TIME. 

there, in his narrative. It is the story of his inward 
life only that he relates. What had time and place 
to do with one who trembled always with the awful 
consciousness of an immortal nature, and about whom 
fell alternately the shadows of hell, and the splen- 
dors of heaven ? We gather indeed from his record, 
that he was not an idle on-looker in the time of Eng- 
land's great struggle for freedom, but a soldier of the 
Parliament, in his younger years among the praying 
sworders and psalm-singing pikemen, the Great- 
Hearts and Hold-fasts, whom he has immortalized in 
his allegory ; but the only allusion he makes in this 
portion of experience, is byway of illustration of the 
goodness of God in preserving him on occasions of 
peril. — Whittier. 

22. ' The soul does not get its royal affections, its 
blessed insights, its sweetness of sensibility and sym- 
pathy, its heroic enthusiasm, its great joy in purity 
and truth, from any mere acquaintance with counsels 
and commentaries. There are depths whicli a man 
must fathom, heights which he must ascend, battles 
which he must fight, realities of the invisible world 
which he must experience before he can largely and 
truly interpret the lovely and awful beauty, and rich 
and majestic fullness of Christ. He can come into 
sacred intimacy of souls only through the door of 
Christ's inspiring brotherhood.' To command their 
confidence he must have wrestled with their temp- 
tations, quivered with their sufferings.' 



PHILOSOPHICAL PROOF. . 197 

I appeal to the recollection of any man who has 
passed through that hour of agony, and stood upon 
the rock at last, the surges stilled below him, and the 
last cloud lifted from the sky above, with a faith, hope, 
and trust, no louger traditional but of his own — a 
trust which neither earth nor hell shall shake thence- 
forth forever. — Robertson. 

' Invisible truth is stronger than indisputable ap- 
pearances.' 

Proof. That which is horn of the flesh, is flesh ; and 
that which is bom of the Spirit, is Spirit. 

Nicodemns ansivered and said unto him, Sow can 
these things be ? 

Put yourself in communication with the truth, all 
non-conductors removed, and you will find the action 
of the Spirit. Apply the philosophy of our great 
American teacher. When Dr. Franklin would prove 
the reality of his supposition that electricity was the 
same as lightning. ' If I can put myself in com- 
munication with the charged cloud, the next thunder 
storm I shall know it.' Accordingly he made his 
preparations ; he prepared his kite, and set the con- 
nections as far as in him lay, and with the key at his 
knuckles waited for the lightning. And the whole 
world knows the result — how the flash came into his 
own frame, thrilling his soul with one of the grand- 
est discoveries in. science. Just suppose that this 
had been a spiritual experiment, and Franklin delib- 
erately trying it in prayer, and putting his own soul 



198 DISCOVERIES. 

in communication with God by the Divine Spirit, and 
had thus become instructed and empowered with an 
experimental knowledge of spiritual things. But if 
he had made a Poor Richard's Almanac on those 
same principles taught him by the Spirit, and had 
gone forth to proclaim them to the multitude, it would 
have been to them as another ' morn risen on mid- 
noon.' Set yourself in connection with Divine Truth, 
removing every disconnecting object and influence as 
far as in you lies, and lift up your heart to heaven 
waiting for the Spirit, and you will feel this lightning 
within you. Put yourself believingly in connection 
with God, and God will speak to you. Make the ex- 
periment your own to see if God's word is true, and 
God will show it to you. lie gave you his truth to be 
thus experimented upon. Prove me in it, he says, 
and see if I be not faithful. ' Ye have departed from 
me and not I from you.' — CheeVer. 

' The early Church were men of like passions 
with ourselves : they doubted not that prayer had 
opened and shut the heavens above Ahab's thirsty 
fields when Elijah had knelt before God: but praying 
in concert for Peter's deliverance from prison, no 
apparition could have startled these good Christians 
more than Peter at their gate : rather than admit 
their petition granted, they were ready to pronounce 
the portress mad, or the person knocking ' a spirit.' ' 

A solitary pilgrim was traversing the desert, re- 
tracing the route of his grandfather, a century and a 



INCIDENTS. 199 

• 

half before. He was on the common highway oi 
travel, which followed for the most part the high 
stony lands constituting the ' backbone of Palestine.' 
' The sun went down ; the night gathered ; the hard 
ground was strewn with wide sheets of bare rock ; 
here and there stood up isolated fragments, like an- 
cient Druidical monuments. Here he lay down to 
rest ; and in the visions of the night the rough stones 
formed themselves into a vast staircase, reaching un- 
to the depth of the starry sky, which, in that wide 
and open space, without interruption of tent or tree, 
stretched over the sleeper's head. On that staircase 
were seen ascending and descending the messengers 
of God, and from above there came the Divine voice.' 
— Stanley. 

We can readily understand Jacob's emotion at 
awaking, when with the evidence that God had, un- 
known to him, been near, he was. afraid and said, 
How dreadful is this place ! Though he had seen 
nobody but friends, had heard nothing but comforts, 
he was thrilled with awe. So when Peter saw the 
great draught of fishes, there was no occasion for 
terror : — but the presence of the Divine Power made 
his weak flesh and blood shudder and cry : ' Depart 
from me, for I am a sinful man, Lord.' Though 
this supernatural favor was not in the least deserved, 
it was beyond question needed. Jacob, troubled 
with his sins, as he dropped into a tired slumber, 
feared God had revoked the word spoken to his 



200 CELESTIAL POWERS. 

fathers, and no sound could have been so grateful as 
the confirmation he heard from above, that he should 
inherit the land, that his descendants should be im- 
mensely numerous, and, that among them one should 
be a blessing to ' all the families of the earth/ 

When believers are in emergencies, the sky opens 
.and down drop promises and celestial friends sent 
forth to minister for them who shall be heirs of sal- 
vation. Little of the powers of the world to come 
we feel, content and interested among our associates ; 
but in a lull like that of Jacob's bivouac, we see and 
hear more than we ever dreamed of. Preternatural 
experiences come when they are needed and can be 
appreciated. . . To make our pilgrimage joyous, our 
upward journey easy, and our hearts light, we should 
obtain interviews with God. — Park. 

26. ' We as yet know but little of the constitution 
of our own nature. Our consciousness has hardly 
penetrated beneath the surface of our being. Our 
deepest and most instructive experiences are only so 
many explorations of the unknown heritage of mind 
and soul with which we are endowed. What we have 
already learned gives us suggestive intimations con- 
cerning the unexplained remainder. We must con- 
clude that our minds are not limited by our present 
and partially developed consciousness, that we have 
outlying provinces of activity and capacity bordering 
everywhere upon the unknown infinite. We know 
that our immaterial nature is open to the beneficent 



THE SUPERNATURAL IN NATURE. 201 

approach of ministering spirits : we are even obliged 
to wrestle against princedoms and powers : and cer- 
tainly the Almighty Father has not hedged in our 
spiritual nature by barriers unsurmountable even by 
Himself.' 

So too, God becomes increasingly our God as he 
is omnipotent, as close to the soul in his habitual 
action as in his less usual gift. 

We believe that a deeper sense of the natural 
would be much truer to the facts that the time draws 
near when God shall discover himself much more in- 
timately and tenderly to us than he now does in the 
hourly shaping and ongoing of what we term Nature, 
of the universe, which gives the conditions of our be- 
ing, and brings close home to us the thoughts, the 
love, the ways of God. 

The open eye, has no occasion to search for God, 
the facts of His being so pour in upon it. Our na- 
ture, such as it is, is the abiding fact of this life ; and 
God's grace works on it as the material which is not 
to be shifted or escaped, or even complemented by a 
new loan from Heaven, but which is to be wrought 
up into Christian character. Many seem to think 
that all this is to be changed by death ; that the knot 
which could not in life be untied is then to be cut ; 
tli at the solution of the problem is to be shirked, and 
that what Nature, aided by grace, has not done, the 
supernatural will abundantly do : that the Kingdom 
of Heaven is, at last, to be vaulted into with a sud- 
9* 



202 THE INDWELLING DEITY. 

den leap. We are afraid of a supernaturalism so 
handled, so trusted in, made in this fashion the scape- 
goat of our indolence and sin. We believe in an 
omnipotent supernaturalism, but one that is breathed, 
as the breath of life into Nature, like that breath 
that made of Adam a living soul. — Bascom. 

' The only greatness worth the name, is the 
greatness of achievement. With this grandest les- 
son of history before their eyes, and with the open 
Bible in their hands, it is passing strange how little 
conception many Christians have of the achievements 
possible in the matter of personal religious culture. 
They are like blind travelers walking through a gold 
mine, with scanty food for to-day in their knapsacks, 
but with no idea of the untold opulence lying • all 
around them.' 

Take away all the detestable things and I will put 
a neiv spirit within you — an heart of flesh — and they 
shall be my people and I will be their Grod. 

All this is to be learned, experienced, and practised 
within, by careful and constant attention to our indi- 
vidual consciousness ; which has its laws of disturb- 
ances and influences, and its capacities for discipline, 
regulation, advancement, and purification. And it is 
to the great field of human labor we must look for 
religious advancement of the human family. — Hal- 
lowell. 

28. Old Age. — Even to hoalr hairs will I carry you. 
An old, old man, with, beard as white as snow. — Spenser. 



OLD AGE. 203 

What is the worst of woes that wait on age ? 

What stamps the wrinkle deepest on the brow ? 
To view each loved one blighted from life's page, 
And be alone on earth — as I am now. — Byron. 
«... Those tones of dear delight, 
The morning welcome, and the sweet good-night. 

— Sprague. 
Can gold remove the mortal hour ? 
In life, can love be bought with gold ? 
Are friendship's pleasures to be sold ? — Johnson. 

As a man advances in life, lie gets what is better 
than admiration, — judgment to estimate things at 
their true value. — Johnson. 

Johnson, now in his seventieth year said, 'it is a 
man's own fault, it is from want of use, if his mind 
grows torpid in old age. An old man does not lose 
faster than he gains, if he exerts himself.' 

If the soul aspires for pure and perfect liberty, it 
also aspires for everything that is noble in Truth, holy 
in Virtue. The soul never grows old : the eye of 
age can take in the impression of Beauty with the 
same enthusiastic joy which leaped through the heart 
of childhood. — Bayard Taylor. 

1. October. — ■* And all the air a solemn stillness holds.' 

I stand alone upon the peaceful summit of this 
hill, and turn in every direction. The east is all 
aglow ; the blue north flushes all her hills with radi-" 
ance ; the west stands in burnished armor ; the south- 
ern hills buckle the zone of the horizon together 
with emeralds and rubies, such as were never set in 



204 OCTOBER. 

the fabled girdle of the gods ! Of gazing there can 
not be enough. The hunger of the eye grows by 
feeding. — Beecher. 

Spendthrift October, art thou wise, 

Who wastest in thy plenteous prime, 
More beauty on the earth and skies, 
More hue and glow than would suffice 

To brighten all the winter time ? 
Yes — better autumn all delight, 

And then a winter all unblest, 
Than months of mingled dark and light, 
Of faded tints and pallid light, 

Imperfect dreams and broken rest. 

This doubt and dread which naught consoles, 

Which marks our brows ere manhood's prime : 
This dark uncertainty which rolls 
Like chariot wheels across our souls 
And makes us old before our time. 

So pour your light, October skies, 
Oh fairest skies which ever are ! 

Put on, O Earth, your bravest dyes, 
And smile although the cricket cries 

And winter threatens from afar. 

2. From Salt Lake City to Washoe and the Sierra 
Nevada Mountains, the road lies through the most 
horrible desert conceivable by the mind of man. 
For the sand of the Sahara, we find substituted an 
impalpable powder of alkali — white as the driven 
snow, stretching for miles at a time one uninterrupted 
dazzling sheet which supports not even that last ob- 
stinate vidette of civilization — the wild sage bush. 



AMERICAN DESERT. 205 

Its springs are far between and without a single ex- 
ception mere receptacles of a salt potash and sulphur 
hell-broth, which no man would drink save in extre- 
mis. A few days of this beverage within, and of 
wind-drifted alkali invading every pore of the body 
without. . . I look back on that desert as the 
most frightful night-mare of my existence. 

We came into glorious forests of ever-living green ; 
a rainbow affluence of flowers, an air like a draught 
from windows left open in heaven, a crystal sheet of 
water fresh-distilled from the snow-peaks, its granite 
bottom visible from the depth of a hundred feet, its 
banks, a celestial garden lying in a basin thirty-five 
miles long, by ten wide, nearly seven thousand feet 
above the Pacific lave. Here we sat down to rest, 
feeling that one short hour, one little league had 
translated us out of the infernal world into heaven. 
— Bowles. 

Yosemite. — This vast, open cathedral, which would 
hold fifty millions of worshipers is true to the ancient, 
imperious maxim of architecture : its mean width 
about equals the average height of its walls. Our 
eyes now adjusted to its distances were no longer 
pained by the amazing spectacle. At last we turned 
away from this sublimest page of all the book of na- 
ture. I think few can come from its study without 
hearts more humble and reverent, lives more worthy 
and loyal. The rock mountains are the great fea- 
ture ; indeed, they are Yosemite. The nine granite 



206 SUBLIME CREATION. 

■walls which range in altitudes from three to six 
thousand feet are the most striking examples on the 
globe, of the masonry of Nature. Their dimensions 
are so vast that they utterly outrun our ordinary 
standards of comparison. One might as well be 
told of a wall upright like the side of a house for ten 
thousand miles as for two-thirds of one mile. When 
we speak of a giant twenty-five feet high, it conveys 
some definite impression : but to tell of one three 
thousand feet high, would only bewilder and convey 
no meaning whatever. So, at first, these stupend- 
ous walls painfully confuse the mind. By degrees, 
day after day, the sight of them clears it, until at 
last, one receives a just impression of their solemn 
immensity. — Richardson. 

It was in Switzerland that I first felt how con- 
stantly to contemplate sublime creation develops the 
poetic power. It was here that I first began to 
study nature. Those forests of black,. gigantic pines, 
rising out of the deep snows ; those tall, white cata- 
racts, leaping like headstrong youth into the world, 
and dashing from their precipices, as if allured by 
the beautiful delusion of their own rainbow mist; 
those mighty clouds sailing beneath my feet, or 
clinging to the bosoms of the dark-green mountains, 
or boiling up like a spell from the invisible and un- 
fathomable depths ; the fell avalanche, fleet as a 
spirit of evil, terrific when its sound suddenly breaks 
upon the almighty silence, scarcely less tarrible when 



SWITZERLAND. 207 

we gaze upon its crumbling and pallid frame varied 
only by the presence of one or two blasted firs ; the 
head of a mountain loosening from its brother peaks, 
rooting up in the roar of its rapid rush, a whole forest 
of pines, and covering the earth for miles with ele- 
phantine masses ; the supernatural extent of land- 
scape that opens to us new worlds ; the strong eagles, 
and the strange wild birds that suddenly cross you 
in your path, and stare, and shrieking fly — and all 
the soft sights of joy and loveliness that mingle with 
these sublime and savage spectacles, the rich pastures, 
and the numerous flocks, and the golden bees, and 
the wild flowers, and the carved and painted cottages, 
and the simple manners and the primaeval grace — 
wherever I moved, I was in turn appalled or enchant- 
ed ; but whatever I beheld, new images ever sprang 
up in my mind, and new feelings ever crowded on 
my fancy. — Disraeli. 

4. The imagination. — Its second and ordinary use 
is to empower us to traverse the scenes of all other 
history, and force the facts to become again visible, 
so as to make upon us the same impression which 
they would have made if we had witnessed them ; and 
in the minor necessities of life, to enable us out of any 
present good, to gather the utmost measure of en- 
joyment by investing it with happy associations, and, 
also, to give to all mental truths some visible type 
in allegory, simile, or personification, which shall 
more deeply enforce them ; and finally, when the 



208 THE IMAGINATION. 

mind is utterly outwearied, to refresh it with such in- 
nocent play as shall be most in harmony with the 
suggestive voices of natural things, permitting it to 
possess living companionship instead of silent beauty. 
These being the uses of imagination, its abuses are 
either in creating for mere pleasure, false images, 
where it is its duty to create true ones, or in turning 
what was intended for the mere refreshment of the 
heart into its daily food, and changing the innocent 
pastimes of an, hour into the guilty occupation of a 
life. 

It is said that modern science is averse to the 
exercise and development of the imaginative faculty. 
But is it really so ? Are visions such as those in 
which we have been indulging less richly charged 
with that poetic pabulum on which fancy feeds' and 
grows strong, than those ancient tales of enchant- 
ment and faery which beguiled of old in solitary 
homesteads, the long winter nights? Because science 
flourishes must poesy decline ? The complaint seems 
but to betray the weakness of the class who urge it. 
True, in an age like the present, — considerably more 
scientific than poetical, — science substitutes for the 
smaller poetry of fiction, the great poetry of truth : 
and as there is a more general interest felt in new 
revelations of what God has wrought, than in exhibi- 
tions of what the humbler order of poets have half- 
borrowed, half-invented, the disappointed dreamers 
complain that the ' material laws' of science have 



THE POETRY OF TRUTH. ' 209 

pushed them from their place. As well might the 
Arab who prided himself upon the beauty of some 
white tent which he had reared in some green oasis 
of the desert, complain of the dull tools of Belzoni's 
laborers, when engaged in clearing from the sands, 
the front of some august temple of the ancient time. 
It is not the tools, it might well be said to the corn- 
plainer, that are competing with your neat little tent: 
it is the sublime edifice hitherto covered up, which 
the tools are laying bare. Nor is it the material 
laws, we may on the same principle say to the poets 
of the querulous cast, that are overbearing your little 
inventions ; but those sublime works and wonderful 
actings of the Creator Which they unveil and bring 
into comparison with yours. But from His works 
and His actings have the masters of the lyre ever de- 
rived their choicest materials ; and whenever a truly 
great poet arises — one that will add a profound intel- 
lect to a powerful imagination,---he will find science 
not his enemy, but an obsequious caterer and a de- 
voted friend. What is it, let me ask, that imparts • 
to Nature its poetry? It is not in Nature itself: it 
resides not either in dead or organized matter, — in 
reck, or bird, or flower : ' the deep saith it is not in 
me, and the sea saith it is not in me.' It is in mind 
that it lives and* breathes : external nature is but it^ 
storehouse of subjects and models, and it is not till 
these are called in as images, and invested with ' the 
light that never was on land or sea,' that they cease 



210 NATURE ETHERIALIZED. 

to be of the earth, earthy, and form the etherial stuff 
of which the visions of poets are made. Nay, is it 
not mainly through that associative faculty to vv T hich 
the sights and sounds of present nature become sug- 
gestive of the images of a nature not present, but 
seen within the mind that the landscape pleases, or 
that we find beauty in its woods or beside its streams, 
or the impressive and sublime among its mountains 
and its rocks? Nature is a. vast tablet inscribed 
with signs, each of which has its own significancy, 
and becomes poetry in the mind when read ; and geo- 
logy is simply the key by which myriads of these 
signs, hitherto undecipherable, can be unlocked find 
perused, and thus a new province added to the poeti- 
cal domain. — Hugh Miller. 

Scottish poetry is the poetry of Home, of Nature, 
and the Affections. All this is sadly wanting in our 
young literature. We have no songs. American 
domestic life has never been hallowed and beautified 
by the sweet, and graceful, and tender associations 
of poetry. We have no Yankee pastorals. Our riv- 
ers and streams turn mills and float rafts, and are 
otherwise as commendably useful as those of Scot- 
land : but no quaint ballad or simple song reminds 
us that men and women have loved, met and parted 
on their banks, or that beneath each roof within those 
valleys, the tragedy and comedy of life has been en- 
acted. Our poetry is cold and imitative : it seems 
more the product of overstrained intellects, than the 



A MINE UNWORKED. 211 

spontaneous, outgushing of hearts warm with love, 
and strongly sympathizing with human nature as it 
actually exists about us, with the joys and griefs of 
the men and women we meet daily. Who shall say 
that we have not the essential of the poetry of hu- 
man life and simple nature, of the hearth, and the 
farm-field ? Here then is a mine unworked, a har- 
vest ungathered. Who shall sink the shaft, and 
thrust in the sickle ? And here let us say that the 
mere dilletaute and the amateur ruralist may as well 
keep their hands off. The prize is not tor them. 
He who would successfully strive must be himself 
what he sings, — part and parcel of the rural life of 
New England ; one who has grown strong amidst its 
healthful influences, familiar with all its details, and 
capable of detecting whatever of beauty, humor, or 
pathos pertain to it. — Whittier. 

The grand difference between a Dryasdust and a 
sacred poet is very much even this : To distinguish 
well what does still reach to the surface, and is alive 
and frondent for us : and what reaches no longer to 
the surface, but moulders safe under ground, never to 
send forth leaves and fruit for mankind any more. 
When both oblivion and memory are wise, when the 
general soul of man is clear, melodious, true, there 
may come a modern Iliad as memorial of the Past. — 
Carlyle. 

We have been eighty years an organized nation, 
ninety-three years an independent people, more 



212 AN AMERICAN POET. 

than two hundred years an American race, and to- 
day, for the first time in our history, we met to dedi- 
cate publicly a monument to an American Poet. 

The rhythmical expression of emotion, or passion, 
or thought, is a need of the human race — -coeval with 
speech, universal as religion, the prophetic forerun- 
ner as well as the last begotten offspring of civiliza- 
tion. Poetry belongs equally to the impressible 
childhood of a people, and to the refined ease of their 
maturity. It is both, the instructive effort of Nature, 
and the loftiest ideal of Art, receding to farther and 
farther spheres of spiritual Beauty, as men rise to 
the capacity of its enjoyment. But our race was 
transferred half-grown, from the songs of its early 
ages and the inspiring associations of its Past, and 
set here, face to face with stern tasks, which left no 
space for the lighter play of the mind. The early 
generations of English bards gradually became for 
eign to us, for their songs, however sweet, were not 
those of our own home. We profess to claim an 
equal share in Chaucer, and Spenser, and Shakes- 
peare ; but it is a hollow pretence. They belong to 
our language, but we cannot truly feel that they be- 
long to us as a people. The destiny that placed us 
on this soil robbed us of the magic of tradition, the 
wealth of romance, the suggestions of history, the 
sentiment of inherited homes and customs, and left 
us shorn of our lisping childhood, to create a poetic 
literature for ourselves. It is not singular, therefore, 



DANA AND HALLECK. 213 

that this Continent should have waited long for its 
first-born poet. The intellect, the energy of charac- 
ter, the moral force — even the occasional taste and 
refinement, — which were shipped hither from the 
older shores, found the hard work of history already 
portioned out for them, and the muses discovered no 
nook of guarded leisure, no haunt of sweet contem- 
plation, which might tempt them to settle among us. 
Labor may be Prayer, but it is not Poetry. Liberty 
of Conscience and Worship, practical Democracy, 
the union of Civil Order and personal Independence, 
are ideas which may warm the hearts and brains of 
men, but the soil in which they strike root is too 
full of fresh, unsoftened forces to produce the deli- 
cate wine of song. The highest product of ripened 
intellect cannot be expected in the nonage of a nation. 
In the same year in which the Constitution of the 
United States was completed and adopted, the first 
poet was born — Richard Henry Dana, who still lives 
and, despite his gray head, still keeps the freshness 
and youth of the poetic nature. Less than three years 
after him Fitz-Greene Halleck came into the world — 
the lyrical genius following the grave and contempla- 
tive muse of his elder brother. In Halleck, therefore, 
we mourn our first loss out of the first generation of 
American bards ; and a deeper significance is thus 
given to the personal honors which we lovingly pay 
to his memory. Let us be glad, not only that these 
honors have been so nobly deserved, but also that we 
find in him a fitting representative of his age ! 



214 INTRINSIC QUALITIES. 

Let us forget our sorrow for the true man, the 
steadfast friend, and rejoice that the earliest child of 
song whom we return to the soil that bore him for 
us, was the brave, bright, and beautiful growth of a 
healthy, masculine race. No morbid impatience with 
the restrictions of life, no fruitless lament over an 
unattainable ideal, no inherited gloom of tempera- 
ment, such as finds delight in what it chooses to call 
despair, ever muffled the clear notes of his verse, or 
touched the sunny cheerfulness of his history. His 
life offers no enigmas for our solution. Clear, frank, 
simple, and consistent, his song and his life were wo- 
ven into one smooth and even thread. We would 
willingly pardon in him some expression ol dissatis- 
faction with a worldly fate, which, in certain respects, 
seemed inadequate to his genius, but we find that he 
never uttered it. The basis of his nature was a 
knightly bravery, of such firm and enduring temper 
that it kept from him even the ordinary sensitiveness 
of the poetic character. From the time of his stud- 
ies as a boy, in the propitious kitchen which heard 
his first callow numbers, to the last days of a life 
which had seen no liberal, popular recognition of his 
deserts, he accepted his fortune with the perfect dig- 
nity of a man who cannot stoop to discontent. Dur- 
ing his later visits to New York, the simplest, the 
most unobtrusive, yet the cheerfullest man to be 
seen among the throngs of Broadway, was Fitz- 
Greene Halleck. Yet, with all his simplicity, his 



INTRINSIC QUALITIES. 215 

bearing was strikingly gallant and fearless f tne car- 
riage of his head suggested the wearing of a helmet, 
the genial frankness and grace of his manner, in his 
intercourse with men, has suggested to others the 
epithet i courtly,' but I prefer to call it manly ', as the 
expression of a rarer and finer quality than is usu- 
ally found in the atmosphere of courts. It is not 
necessary that we should attempt to determine his 
relative place among American poets. It is sufficient 
that he deserves every honor that we can render to 
his memory, not only as one of the very first repre- 
sentatives of American Song, but from his intrinsic 
quality as a poet. Let us rather be thankful for 
every star set iir our heaven, than seek to ascertain 
how they differ from one another in glory. If any 
critic would diminish the loving enthusiasm of those 
whose lives have been brightened by the poet's per- 
sonal sunshine,. let him remember that the sternest 
criticism will set the lyrics of Halleck higher than 
their author's unambitious estimate. A poem which 
bears within itself its own right to existence will not 
die. Its rhythm is freshly fed from the eternal 
pulses of Beauty, whence flows the sweetest life of 
the human race. The poetic literature of a land is 
the finer and purer ether above its material growth 
and the vicissitudes of its history. — Bayard Taylor. 
11. Coleridge is rich almost beyond comparison in 
euphonious and assonant alliteration. Much of the 
wild and weird effect of the ' Ancient' Mariner ' and 



216' COLERIDGE. 

of the mastery of its spell is due to the subtle inter- 
linking of the sounds of letters. The fascination is 
intensified by the congregation and commingling of 
similar vocables and the coloring is thereby deepened. 

The breezes blew, the white foam flew, 

The furrow followed free : 
We were the first that ever burst 

Into that silent sea. 

Once more — 

And the coming wind did roar more loud, 

And the sails did siodi like sed^e. — Rural New Yorker. 

12. I have somewhere read of an eminent person, 
who used in his private offices of devotion to give 
thanks to Heaven that he was born a Frenchman : 
for my part I look upon it as a peculiar blessing that 
I was born an -Englishman. Among many other 
reasons I think myself very happy in my country, as 
the language of it is wonderfully adapted to a man 
who is sparing of his words, and an enemy to loqua- 
city. The English delight in feilence more than any 
other European nation, if the remarks made on us by 
foreigners are true. 

This liumor shows itself, first of all by its abound- 
ing in monosyllables, which gives us an opportunity 
of delivering our thoughts in few sounds. This in- 
deed takes off from the elegance of our tongue, but 
expresses our ideas in the readiest manner, and con- 
sequently, answers the first design of speech better 
than the multitude of syllables, which make the 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 217 

words of other languages more tunable and sonorous. 
In the next place we may observe that where the 
words are not monosyllables, we often make them so, 
by our rapid pronunciation, — which has turned a 
tenth part of our smoothest words into so many clus- 
ters of consonants. . . There is another particu- 
lar in our language which is a great instance of our 
frugality of words, and that is the suppressing of 
several particles which must be produced in other 
tongues to make a sentence intelligible ; this often 
perplexes the best writers, when they find the rela- 
tives, whom, which, or they, at their mercy, whether 
they may have admission or not ; and will never be 
decided until we have something like an academy, 
that by the best authorities and rules drawn from 
the analogy of languages shall settle all controversies 
between grammar and idiom. — Addison. 

There is for every thought a certain nice adaptation 
of words, which none other could equal, and which 
when a man has been so fortunate as to hit, he has 
attained the perfection of language. — Boswell. 

It is now the accepted doctrine of philologists 
that thought is impossible, beyond the most rudi- 
mentary limits, without signs, through which we not 
only communicate with our fellows, but slowly climb 
ourselves, from round to round of conception, till our 
whole intellectual fabric is built up. The develop- 
ment of intelligence is the development of its sym- 
bols ; for every emotion, however fugitive and deli- 
10 



218 ACCENT. 

cate, is born in the word which thereaterf becomes 
its home, — the obedient, docile, ever-ready word, — 
the sound so flexible that it bends to each whim and 
caprice of its master's bidding, and yet so firm and 
infixed in the very soul of things that it outlasts the 
mountains and the stars. 

Art, by the spontaneous play of fantasy, discerns 
the most subtle, remote, recondite, and unsuspected 
analogies between things which have nothing in com- 
mon, not even existence, and out of tliem evokes a 
gorgeous corruscation that, like an aurora, fills the 
whole sky with splendor; but, unlike the aurora, 
once kindled will never fade. — Godwin. 

Intellect in any science is indicated by classifica- 
tion and arrangement. Accent is the subordination 
of inferior things to superior — gives predominance to 
leading thoughts — what mountains are to the globe, 
and fixed stars to the planets. The more refined the 
accent, the more cultured the intellect. An idiot 
jumbles. A person in low spirits, or in a loose and 
unhinged state of mind, moans and monotones : key- 
ed up and excited, he defines and analyzes by accent. 
The higher the intellectual refinement, the keener 
the appreciation of words, the broader and minuter is 
the poet's domain in all the fine shades of thought 
— Bartlett. 

14. Genius. — An organization so sensitive that it 
easily goes into a state of exaltation and produces 
results more fruitful than can be produced by ordi- 
nary means. — Beecher. 



GENIUS. 219 

Genius pertains always and exclusively to the 
moral nature. Spiritual sympathy is its very atmos- 
phere. But this sympathy in some men is so entire- 
ly occupied and absorbed in an ideal world, and is so 
exclusively directed toward goals that are only dis- 
cerned by the highest order of prophetic instinct, that 
it scarcely touches the individual heart : its appeal is 
to the race. Our Platos operate by cycles — through 
the attraction of gravitation, rather than through the 
molecular affinities. This perhaps is the highest or- 
der of human power ; it is certainly the grandest. 
But there is another kind of genius that does not 
elevate itself above the immediate circle of its move- 
ment, but which most strongly allies itself with 
the moral forces with which it comes in contact. — 
Curtis. 

Mr. Raymond's official career, though evincing 
ability, did less than justice to his comprehensive 
knowledge and rare intellectual powers. Never so 
positive and downright in his convictions as his 
countrymen are apt to be, he was often misjudged as 
a trimmer and time-server, when, in fact, he spoke 
and wrote exactly as he felt and thought. If what 
he uttered to-day was not in full accordance with 
what he said yesterday, the difference evinced in his 
essay was a true reflection of one which had preceded 
it in his mind. — Greeley. 

The secret of genius is to suffer no fiction to exist 
for us ; to realize all that we know, in the high re- 



220 ODE TO GENIUS. 

finement of modern life, in arts, in sciences, in books, 
in men ; to exact good faith, reality, and a purpose ; 
and first, last, midst, and without end, to honor every 
truth by use. — Emerson. 

c A life impetuous with desire 

To battle on the plains of Right : 

A quick brain kindling tongues of fire 
To light the torch on Freedom's height. 9 

© O 

Ode to Genius. — AJ1 things tremble, all things bow 
Before thy awfully majestic brow 
Save Goodness ; Cowardice and gloomy Fear 
Shrink backward, cowering from thy look severe, 
One burning glance, 
One leveled lance 
From that sunbeamy eye, 
And Bribery and Avarice, 
Grim Tyranny and Prejudice, 
And Wrong and Folly fly ; 
And Pride and dull Pretension melt away, 
Like night before the golden wheels of day. 

Like Israel's glorious leader thou dost stretch 
Thy wand across the rushing tide of years 

And roll it back, and from its chambers fetch 
To life its lovely wrecks and smiles and tears. 

The fiery secrets of the universe 
Come to thy call — 

The glorious generations 

© © 

Of former worlds leap from their marble graves 
And unto thee rehearse 
The mighty poem of the lost creations. 
— Hempstead. 



THE CATHEDRAL. 221 

Out from the heart oi nature rolled 

The burdens of the Bible old. 

The litanies of nations came 

Like the volcano's tongue of flame : 

Up from the burning core below, 

The canticles of love and woe. 

The hand that rounded Peter's dome, 

And groined the aisles of Christian Rome, 

Wrought in sad sincerity, 

Himself from God he could not free. 

He builded better than he knew, 

The conscious stone to beauty grew. 

Know'st thou what wove you wood-bird's nest 

Of leaves and feathers from her breast ? 

Or how the fish outbuilt her shell, 

Painting with morn each annual cell ? 

Or how the sacred pine-tree adds 

To his old trees new myriads ? 

Such and so grew these holy piles, 

Whilst love and terror laid the tiles. — Emerson. 

Or speak to the earth and it shall teach thee, and 
the fishes of the sea shall declare it unto thee. Wlio 
knoweth not in all these that the hand of the Lord hath 
wrought this ? 

16. Wisdom is the gift of God, who told Moses 
that he had filled with wisdom and understanding 
and knowledge Bezaleel and Aholiah, to invent and 
perform several sorts of work for completing the 
tabernacle. It was this sort of wisdom that Solomon 
entreated of God with so much earnestness, and 
which God granted him with great liberality. 

As for these four children, Gfod gave them know- 



222 GENIUS AND STUDY. 

ledge and skill in all learning and wisdom : and 

Daniel had understanding in all visions and dreams. 

Or rapt Isaiah's wild, seraphic fire. — Burns. 

For mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts. 

17. It is not the amount which is poured in, that 
gives wisdom, but the amount of creative mind and 
heart working on, and stirred by, what is so poured 
in. — Beecher. 

To Foster a text of Scripture suggested more sub- 
lime thoughts than could ever be suggested from the 
prolixity of Gill, or even from the simple piety of 
Henry. . „ He combined with mechanical labors 
the severest application to study, frequently spending 
great part of many a night in reading and in thos£ 
prolonged meditations which furnished him with a 
key to the secret and deep places of mind ; providing 
that microscopic species of perception which detects 
whole realms of life where others see but a tame, 
dead level. — Sharpe's Magazine. 

The lamp of genius tho' by nature lit, 

If not protected, prun'd and fed with care, 

Soon dies, or runs to waste with fitful glare. — Wilco x. 

Buckle. — His first real power was shown in the 
game of chess, in which he had made an European 
name before he was twenty years old. During his 
stay on the Continent the idea of his great work first 
dawned upon his mind. As the thought expanded 
his sense of power increased, and the faculty of ori- 



BUCKLE. 223 

ginal speculation sprang into life. His desultory 
studies were now co-ordinated to one definite pur- 
pose. He conceived the gigantic project of setting 
forth in one connected view the various paths by 
which the human intellect has won the fullness and 
freedom which we call civilization, seeking through 
the records of history for the same empire of law in 
the march of human progress which physical science 
discloses in the material universe. No man was 
ever so fully prepared for labor on so extensive a field. 
He ranged over extensive provinces of science in 
order to master every fruitful principle to trace the 
influence of philosophical methods on the progress of 
knowledge, and thus to find the basis of those wide 
generalizations, which underlie his theory. Within 
those limits there was perhaps no branch of science 
which he had not studied, of which he had not fol- 
lowed the history and tracked the important threads 
of discovery. In metaphysical research — his pur- 
pose was the same. From the earliest Greek to the 
latest German, he read with the aim of seizing in 
each system the master-thought which had shaped 
the practical philosophy or political life of nations. 
In literature, he did not seek for mere scholarship, 
but to trace the development of intellect through the 
forms of different languages and different social con- 
ditions. For this purpose he had made himself ac- 
quainted with most of the languages of Europe. — 
Tpjbuxe. 



224 BLOSSOM OF THE INTELLECT. 

v; Human wisdom is the fruit of intellectual activity 
and spontaneity : the heavenly wisdom, on the con- 
trary, is an effect of divine influence on man's re- 
ceptive faculties, and is the root of the life of faith. 
But while faith belongs altogether to the heart, wis- 
dom, in its heavenly form, is a blossom of the intel- 
lect.— Olshausex. 

' Power dwelt in his broad, un wrinkled forehead 
and pensive eyes — such subtle, mysterious power, 'as 
Nature sometimes endows men with, making them 
royal in a kingdom where to be supreme is to be im- 
mortal.' 

. . • he belongs to the band of far-shining men 
of whom Pericless declares the whole world to be the 
tomb. — Morley. 

Courage, poor Grandfather : here is a new second 
edition of a Friedrich, the first having gone off with 
so little effect : this one's back is still unbroken, his 
life's seed-field not yet filled with tares and thorns ; 
who knows but Heaven will be kinder to this one ? 
Heaven was much kinder to this one. Him Heaven 
had kneaded of more potent stuff: a mighty fellow 
this one, and a strange — related to the Sphere-har- 
monies, and the divine and demonic Powers ; of a 
swift, far-darting nature this one, like an Apollo 
clad in sun-beams and in lightnings (after his sort,) 
and with a back which all the world could not suc- 
ceed in breaking. Yes, if, by most rare chance, this 
was indeed a new man of genius, born into the pur- 



SIMPLICITY OF GENIUS. 225 

blind, rotten century, in the acknowledged rank of a 
king there — man of genius, that is to say, man of 
originality and veracity, capable of seeing with his 
eyes, and incapable of not believing what he sees. 
Then, truly. — Carlyle. 

21. Simplicity. — Chatham had one fault, which of 
all human faults is most rarely found in company 
with true greatness. He was extremely affected. 
He was an almost solitary instance of a man of real 
genius, and of a brave, lofty, and commanding spirit, 
without simplicity of character. — Macaulay. 

De Witt. — His simplicity and openness amazed 
Temple, who had been accustomed to the affected 
solemnity of his patron, the Secretary, and to the 
eternal doublings and evasions which passed for 
great feats of statesmanship among the Spanish poli- 
ticians at Brussels. l Whoever,' he wrote to Arling- 
ton, 'deals with M. De Witt, must go the same plain 
way — without refining, or coloring, or offering 
shadow for substance.' He was scarcely less struck 
by the modest dwelling and frugaltable of the first citi- 
zen of the richest state in the world. While Claren- 
don was amazing London with a dwelling more 
sumptuous than the palace of his master, while Ar- 
lington was lavishing his ill-gotten wealth on the 
decoys and orange gardens and interminable conser- 
vatories of Euston, — the great statesman who had 
frustrated all their plans of conquest, and the roar of 
whose guns they had heard with terror even in the 
10* 



226 SORROW OF GENIUS. 

galleries of Whitehall, kept only a single servant, 
walked about the streets in the plainest garb, and 
never used a coach, except for visits of ceremony. — 
Macaulay. 

22. Sorrow. — ' Till A rom the straw the flail the corn doth beat, 
Until the chaff be purged from the wheat ; 
Yea, till the mill the grains in pieces tear, 
The richness of the flour will scarce appear.' 

Oh, let us thank God for the love and sorrow of 
genius ! Yet let us thank him reverently, as we 
thank him for all the blessings which come to us, by 
the sacrifice and pains of others. We take the flow- 
ers that blossom from the thorny stems, but they 
long for the time when the Master's eye shall see 
that the fruit is ripe, and his hand shall gather it in. 
— Garrett. 

Is not this the Hood of the men thatioent in jeopar- 
dy of their lives ? — therefore he would not drink it but 
poured it out unto the Lord. 

25. Though I be rude in speech. — 

The gospel sets no value upon the opulence of 
talents with which a man may have been endowed, but 
only upon the disposition of the mind in reference to 
the will of God. It is the upright only to whom God 
shows favor. Now this vain ostentation (of Simon's) 
forms a glaring contrast with the humility of' the 
apostles, who, although really filled with all the 
powers of the heavenly world, yet most sharply re- 
prehended all undue estimation of their own persons. 



A DELEGATED GREATNESS. 227 

They desired to be regarded as nothing but weak in- 
struments, and their illustrious works were designed 
to glorify not themselves, but only the eternal God, 
and his Son. — Olshausen. 

I believe the first test of a truly great man is his 
humility. I do not mean by humility doubt of his 
own power, or hesitation in speaking of his opinions : 
but a right understanding of what he can do and say, 
and the rest of the world's sayings and doings. All 
great men not only know their business, but know 
that they know it, and are not only right in their 
main opinions, but they usually know that they are 
right in them ; only they do not think much cf them- 
selves on that account, — they do not expect their 
fellow-men therefore to fall down and worship them ; 
they have a curious under sense of powerlessness, 
feeling that the greatness is not in them, but through 
them. — Ruskix. 

4 To be good, to be a genuine philanthropist, a 
faithful lover of God and man, having virtue ground 
ed upon truth, — this is always better than intellec- 
tual splendor. It is folly to sigh for gifts not our 
own, or envy renown that seeks other names ; yet all 
may find a place in the temple of virtue, and forever 
carry the garland of victorious goodness. This real- 
ly makes the good man — the man whom God honorg 9 
and who treads the path of immortal fame.' 



228 DIABOLICAL SNEERS. 

1 He who trusts in Christ alone, 
Not in aught himself hath done 
He, great God, shall be thy care, 
And thy choicest blessings share/ 

12. Nehemia'tis Wall. — Now Tobiah said, — Even 
that which they build, if a fox go up, he shall even 
break down their stone wall. Hear, our God, for we 
are despised. 

Help us, our God ! while men with keen derision 
Mock our slight structure as it riseth up : 
Help us our God ! despised are we and broken, 
By many sorrows that the wicked cause : 
Turn thou on them their malice as the token 
Of thine unerring, unevaded laws. — Duffield. 

For still the world prevailed, and its dread laugh 
Which scarce the firm philosopher can scorn. 

— Thomson. 

Adroit casuistry in the art of reasoning. 

I could not undeceive him on this head ; nor what 
was more, could I satisfy my own conscience that he 
was altogether in the wrong ; for, with a diabolical 
ingenuity he had contrived to hit on some of the 
most vexatious doubts which disturbed my mind and 
instinctively to detect the secret cares and difficulties 
that beset me. The lesson should never be lost on 
us that the devil was depicted as a sneerer ! — Lever. 

Doth Job fear Grod for naught? 

14. The Power unseen. — It is easy to sneer at 
sentimentalism ; it is an old style of sneer. It is 



THE POWER UNSEEN. 229 

easy to represent enthusiasm, idealism, high aims, 
unselfish purposes, as coming under that name — an 
old representation. And yet the man who does not 
know it has been stronger than interest, ideas migh- 
tier than armed hosts, beliel masterlul beyond the 
power of empires, — the man who does not know and 
habitually recognize the fact that these things have 
been the world's destroying and creative forces, is as 
blind as a mole to human nature and the history of 
this planet. There have been crises again and again, 
when wealth, honor, power, all that your Philistine 
thinks worth striving for — have been flung into the 
gulf like trash, for the sake of some pure bit of i sen- 
timent ' — aye, even a sentimentalism — an idea 
preached and propagated by men who do not know 
where to get their dinners, lias the power to sweep 
the merchant and his warehouses, the banker and 
his stocks and securities, the alderman and his din- 
ners in a whirlwind away. He knows that these 
vast unseen powers hold the world at their mercy ; 
that a word, a name, an idea, the symbol of an idea, 
a sentiment, a formula embodying it, can crush one 
social order into chaos, and build another on its 
ruin : he knows that it has so been a hundred times, 
and that no man can tell when it may not be again. 
A word — the symbol of a thought — has consumed 
strong cities and wasted half a continent. Another 
such word has built cities in the desert and redeemed 
half an empty world to human uses. A sentiment, 



230 THE POWER UNSEEN. 

an invisible idea may be gathering force to-day, 
taught by the tongues and pens of men you may 
count dreamers, which shall change the earth and 
sweep all things you think enduring into oblivion 
five centuries hence. Do not put your trust in your 
high common-sense, and boasted worldly knowledge ; 
not in the coat, but in the man, not in the husk, but 
in the kernel, not in the casket, but in the jewel. It 
is an old truth, and has a wider sweep than thousands 
always give it. — ; The things which are seen are 
temporal.' — Churchman. 

For in one hoar so great riches is come to naught. 

' Truth, loyalty, and self-respect ! — you are but 
thin shades dwelling in the human breast, lightly 
esteemed, seemingly of little power: but when you 
depart the pillars of the world seem to have fallen in 
so weak and desolate are our lives without you.' 

' A majority in this world are always on the side of 
that which appeals to the physical senses. But it is 
in the lon^ reckonings that the spiritual is shown to 
be in the ascendant.' 

Credible to those who reasoned by sentiment, and 
made syllogisms of their passions, it was incredible 
then and evermore to the sane and healthy intelli- 
gence which in the long run commands the mind 01 
the world. In the long run — yet the force which 
eventually maintains the ascendency is the slowest 
in rising to it. — Froude. 

The race is not to the swift. 



IMPERIAL GREATNESS. 231 

The unremitting attention of high sentiments in 
obscure duties is hardening the character to that tem- 
per winch will work with honor, if need be, in the 
tumult or on the scaffold. 

There are men wno rise refreshed on hearing a 
threat ; men to whom a crisis which intimidates and 
paralyzes the majority, — demanding not the faculties 
of prudence and thrift, but comprehension, immov- 
ableness, the readiness of sacrifice, comes graceful 
and beloved as a bride. — E:\iersox. 

Sir Thomas More. — Seeing that persuasion could 
not move him, then began they more terribly to 
threaten him. ' My Lords,' answered* he, these ter- 
tors be frights for children and not for me.' There- 
upon they, with great displeasure dismissed him: and 
knowing whom (King Henry VIII.) in the defence of 
his innocence he taunted and defied, he well knew 
the price he was to pay for his boldness. Neverthe- 
less, he was in high spirits, and taking boat for 
Chelsea, his son-in-law, Roper, who accompanied him, 
believed from his merriment by the way, that his 
name has been struck out from the bill. When they 
were landed and walking in the garden, Roper said, 
4 1 trust, sir, all is well, you are so merry.' ' It is 
so, indeed, son, thank God.' ? Are you then, sir, 
put out of the bill ? ' ' Wouldst thou know, son, why 
I am so joyful ? In good faith I rejoice that I have 
given the devil a foul fall ; because I have with those 
lords gone so far, that without great shame I can 



232 IMPERIAL GREATNESS. 

never go back.' This heartfelt exultation at having, 
after a struggle to which he felt the weakness of 
human nature might have been unequal, gained the 
victory in his own mind, and though with the almost 
certain sacrifice of life, made it impossible to resile 
— bestows a greatness on these simple and familiar 
words wliich belongs to few uninspired sayings in 
ancient and modern times. 

Whereas he evermore used before at his departure 
from his wife and children whom he tenderly loved, to 
have them bring him to his boat, and there to kiss 
them and bid them farewell — then would he suffer 
none of then! forth at the gate to follow him, and 
with a heavy heart took boat toward Lambeth. On 
his way he whispered into the ear of his son-in-law 
who accompanied him, ' I thank our Lord the field is 
won,' — indicating an entire confidence in his own 
constancy. . . His character both in public and 
private life comes as near to perfection as our na- 
ture will permit : and I must think that there has 
been too much concession on the score that the 
splendor of his great qualities was obscured by intol- 
erance and superstition : and that he voluntarily 
sought his death by violating a law which with a 
safe conscience he might have obeyed. With all my 
Protestant zeal, I must feel a higher reverence for 
Sir Thomas More, than for Oliver Cromwell or Cran- 
mer. — Campbell's Chancellors. 

As the noble owner of Warwick's castle enjoyed 



HUMAN PERFECTION. . 233 

his calm retreat surrounded by his family ; as he 
looked from his windows on his broad domain ; as 
he paced the greensward by the gentle Avon and 
thought of the horrors with which civil conflict 
might ere long cover that happy scene, it must have 
been with reluctance though it was with steady he- 
roism that he buckled on the sword. — Macaulay. 

Whatever may be the price you set upon your pa- 
trimony, your honor — life : hold yourself in readiness 
at all times to sacrifice everything to duty, should 
duty exact such sacrifices from you. Without this 
abrogation of self, this renunciation of every earthly 
advantage rather than to retain it by a* compact with 
evil, — a man can show no heroism of character, nay, 
he may even become a monster ! ' For no one,' in 
the words of Cicero, 4 can be just who fears death, 
sorrow, exile, and poverty, or who prefers those 
things which are the opposite of these to equity.' 
To live with feelings alienated from the transitory 
prosperity by which we are surrounded appears to 
some persons an impracticable and harsh resolve , 
almost allied to barbarism. It is nevertheless true 
that without a timely indifference to these extrane- 
ous goods, we neither know how to live or die worth- 
ily. In whatever form it may be your destiny to 
meet death, show a prompt spirit, a dignified courage 
and sanctify it with all the sincerity and energy of 
your faith. — My Son's Manual. 

For more than forty years, I have so ruled my 



234 COURAGE. 

life that when death came I might face it without 
fear. — Havelock. 

But there is something worse than death. Cow- 
ardice is worse. And it is worse than death, aye, 
worse than a hundred thousand deaths, when a people 
have gravitated down into a creed that the wealth of 
a nation consists not in generous hearts, fire in each 
breast, and freedom on each brow : in national vir- 
tues and primitive simplicity and heroic endurance 
and preference of duty to life. — Beecher. 

' "Worldliness, — the most terrific of any vice.' 
The mind in which either of those three emotions, 
viz., the love of liberty, the love of country, and the 
love of mankind is predominant, will be exalted 
above the immediate wants of mankind ; but if the 
three noble feelings unite and govern in the same 
mind, be sure that that individual will be mighty 
among his race. No matter in what station he is 
born, to what calling he has been destined — there is 
that in his own breast which will bear him upward 
and onward. And the course of conduct which in a 
man of his character, may at first appear presump- 
tuous or impossible, will in the end be found perfectly 
consistent with a confidence which a well-balanced 
and justly discriminating mind should feel in its own 
strength and resources.' 

' But he who can back on a true spirit fall, 
No wrong can excite and no danger appal.' 



CLEAR VISION. 235 

King William III. — One of the most remarkable 
qualities of this man, ordinarily so saturnine and re- 
served, was that danger acted on him like wine ; op- 
ened his heart, loosened his tongue, and toon away 
all appearance of constraint from his manner. On 
this memorable day he was seen wherever the peril 
was the .greatest : — his lieutenants in vain implore 
him to retire to some station from which he could 
give his orders, without exposing a life so valuable 
to Europe. — Macaulay. 

To how many organizations does deadly peril bring 
the noiseless excitement which chains down every 
physical disability and injects the ropy veins with 
unconquerable will, and while wholly detaching the 
mind from all thought of kindred and care of self, 
gives it a thousandfold power of observation, ot 
judgment and decision. — Tpjbuxe Cor. 

19. My heart is toward the governors of Israel ', that 
offered themselves willingly among the people. 

' Without haste, without rest, I forsee a patient 
dozen or hundred men, lay their plans in this gene- 
ration and the next — watching undeterred by tem- 
porary disaster — it moves in its steady way onward 
till it reaps the full harvest of a complete success. ' 

Such souls when they appear are the Imperial 
Guard of virtue, the perpetual reserve, the dictators 
of fortune. One needs not praise their courage, — 
they are the heart and soul ot nature. It is in rug- 
ged crises, in inweariable endurance, and in aims 



235 THE STREAM OF THE WORLD. 

which put sympathy out of question, that the angel 
is shown.' — Emerson. 

20. A talent is perfected in solitude : a character 
in the stream of the world. — Goethe. 

They who will mix with men, and especially they 
who will govern them must in many things obey 
them. They who will yield to no such conditions 
may be hermits, but cannot be generals or statesmen. 
If a man will walk straightforward without turning 
to the right or to the left, he must walk in a desert 
and not in Cheapside. Thus was he enforced to do 
many things which jumped not with his inclination 
nor made for his honor. — Macaulay's Cowley and 
Milton. 

Priedrich to Voltaire : Would you know my way of 
life ? We march from seven in the morning till four 
in the afternoon. I dine then : afterward 1 work. 
I receive tiresome visits : with these comes a detail of 
insipid matters of business. 'Tis wrong-headed men 
punctiliously difficult, who are to be set right ; heads 
too hot which must be restrained ; idle fellows that 
must be urged, impatient men which must be render- 
ed docile, plunderers to be restrained within the 
boundaries of equity ; babblers to hear babbling, 
dumb people to keep in talk ; in fine one has to drink 
with those that like it, to eat with those that are 
hungry : One has to become a Jew with Jews and a 
Pagan with Pagans. — Carlyle. 

22. And as thy servant was busy here and there he 
was gone. 



SOLEMN TRUSTS. 237 

It is the oft-recurring lesson, the forfeiture of sol- 
emn trusts through inadvertence ; great neglects, ir- 
reparable losses, going on under cover of busy at- 
tention to duties here and there. — W. J. B. 

Footprints. — In a red sand-stone deposit in the 
valley of the Connecticut are fossil footprints, made 
by strange, gigantic birds, living in the time of Lias. 
These impressions, made before there existed a human 
mind, even before there lived a single mammalia, ex- 
hibit as distinctly every claw and phalange, as when 
first imprinted on the soft sand, and show a wonderful 
record to those skilled in reading the petrified hiero- 
glyphics in the diary of the world's creation. 

Reader, what footprints are you making? Are 
you so near a cipher that you may fall out of the 
ranks unmissed ? Unless you are a drone, a nonen- 
tity, doing nothing, living for nothing, except to eat, 
sleep, and die, your footprints will last, keep a record 
and teach a lesson. — Preston. 

Lives of great men all remind us 
We can make our lives sublime, 

And departing leave behind us 
Footprints on the sands of time. 

— Longfellow. 

We can think of no sublimer spectacle within the 
limits of flesh and blood than that furnished by a 
great and pure mind, strengthened and adorned by 
the accumulated knowledge of ages, thrilled with the 
insperation of its task, eager for its work, exposing 



238 THE HISTORIC DEAD. 

error, finding and defending truth, pleading the 
cause of justice and right, lifting human thought 
above its usual level, hastening forward the grand 
march of society, working by night and by day to 
illumine and bless mankind, and then through the 
open gates of eternity ascending to the skies. 

The bare possibility of achieving such a life ought 
to stir every mind with the ardors of the most in- 
tense enthusiasm. To make a good impression upon 
the world — an impression that shall not only endure, 
but descend along the current of ages with expanding 
and increasing power, by attaching to itself new and 
auxiliary causes of greatness — is an object which any 
being may well covet, whether man or angel. A life 
which attains this object is a grand success. The 
actor therein has, as he deserves, a place among the 
Historic Dead. — Spear. 

*I shall be glad that I did work and weep — 

Be glad, O God, my slumbering soul did wake- 
Be glad my stubborn heart did heave and break 
Beneath thy plow — when angels come to'reap.' 

Sir Eardly Wilmot. — We must place him far 
above those who have been tempted by inordinate 
ambition, to mean or wicked actions ; yet we cannot 
consider his public character as by any means ap- 
proaching to perfection, for he was much more soli- 
citous for his own ease than for the public good. By 
hoooming a representative of the people^, he might 



SIR EARDLY WILM0T. 239 

have materially assisted the house of Commons in 
its legislative deliberation. By accepting the great 
seal he would have rescued the country from the 
incompetency of Bathurst, who, hardly qualified to 
be a chairman of Quarter Sessions, presided seven 
years on the woolsack. Filling the marble chair, 
what benefits might he not have conferred upon the 
community by his decisions and by the amendment 
of our laws ! He was deterred not by any misgiv* 
ings as to his own qualifications, or by any dislike to 
the political opinions of those with whom he was to 
be associated in the Cabinet, but by morbid hatred 
of conspicuous position and by selfish love of tranquil- 
lity. He did not shun political strife that he might 
make discoveries in science, or contribute to the 
literary fame of his country. The tendency of the 
tastes by which he was animated is to make life not 
only inglorious but useless. — Campbell's Chief 
Justices. 

Sir William Temple. — He is not without preten- 
sions to the most honorable place among the states- 
men of his time. Yet Temple is not a man to our 
taste. A temper not naturally good, but under strict 
command, — a constant regard to decorum, a rare 
caution in playing that mixed game of skill and ha- 
zard, human life ; a disposition to be content with 
small but certain winnings rather than go on doub- 
ling the stake, — these seem to us to be the most re- 
markable features of his character. This sort of 



240 SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE. 

moderation when united, as in him it was, with very- 
considerable abilities, is, under ordinary circum- 
stances, scarcely to be distinguished from the highest 
and purest integrity ; and yet may be perfectly com- 
patible with laxity of principle, with coldness of 
heart, and with the most intense selfishness. Temple, 
we fear, had not sufficient warmth and elevation of 
sentiment to deserve the name of a virtuous man. 
He did not betray or oppress his country : nay, he 
rendered considerable service to her, but he did no- 
thing for her. No temptation which either the king or 
the opposition could hold out ever induced him to come 
forward as the supporter either of arbitrary or of fac- 
tious measures. But he was most careful never to 
give offence by strenuously opposing such measures. 
He never put himself prominently before the public 
eye, except at conjunctures when he was almost cer- 
tain to gain, and could not possibly lose ; — at conjunc- 
tures when the interest of the state, the views of the 
court, and the passions of the multitude all appeared 
for an instant to coincide. By judiciously availing 
himself of several of these rare moments, he succeed- 
ed in establishing a high character for wisdom and 
patriotism. When the favorable crisis was passed, 
he never risked a reputation which he had won. He 
avoided the great offices of state with a caution al- 
most pusillanimous, and confined himself to quiet 
and secluded departments of public business, in 
which he could enjoy moderate but certain advantage 



SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE. 241 

without incurring envy. If the circumstances of the 
country became such that it was impossible to take 
any part in politics without some danger, he retired to 
his library and his orchard ; and, while the nation 
groaned under oppression, or resounded with tumult 
and with the din of civil arms, amused himself by 
writing memoirs and tying up apricots. Of course a 
man is not bound to be a politician any more than 
he is bound to be a soldier ; and there are perfectly 
honorable ways of quitting both politics and the 
military profession. But neither in the one way of 
life, nor in the other, is any man entitled to take all 
the sweet and leave all the sour. A man who be- 
longs to the army only in time of peace, — who ap- 
pears at reviews in Hyde Park, escorts the sovereign 
with the utmost valor and fidelity to and from the 
House of Lords, and retires as soon as he thinks it 
likely that he may be ordered on an expedition — is 
justly thought to have disgraced himself. Some por- 
tion of a censure due to such a holiday-soldier may 
justly fall on the mere holiday-politician, who 
flinches from his duties as soon as those duties 
become difficult and disagreeable ; — that is to say, as 
soon as it becomes peculiarly important that he 
should resolutely perform them. 

He loved fame, but not with the love of an exalted 
and generous mind. He loved it as an end, not at all 
as a means ; — as a personal luxury, not at all as an 
instrument of advantage to others. He scraped it to- 
ll 



242 SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE. 

gether and treasured it up with a timid and niggardly 
thrift, and never employed the hoard in any enterprise, 
however virtuous and honorable, in which there was 
hazard of losing one particle. It was his constitution 
to dread failure more than he desired success, — to 
prefer security, comfort, repose, leisure, to the turmoil 
and anxiety which are inseparable from greatness ; 
and this natural languor of mind when contrasted 
with the malignant energy of the keen and restless 
spirits among whom his lot was cast, sometimes ap- 
pears to resemble the moderation of virtue. But we 
must own that he seems to us to sink into littleness 
and meanness when we compare him — we do not say 
with any high standard of morality, — but with many 
of those frail men who, aiming at noble- ends, but 
often drawn from the right path by strong passions 
and strong temptations, have left to posterity a doubt- 
ful and checkered fame. — Macaulay. 

25. Let every man abide in the same calling where- 
in he was called. 

Probably, I should not consciously and deliberately 
forsake my particular calling to do the good which 
society demands of me, to save the universe from an- 
nihilation ; and I believe that a like, but infinitely 
greater steadfastness elsewhere is all that preserves 
it. — Thoreau. 

A man may contribute his share to the welfare of 
society, by inspiring his time with abetter knowledge 
of things, which knowledge is to elevate the masses 
of men. — Beecher. 



SELF-INSIGHT. 243 

This is a place to give a man chances, ana try what 
stuff is in him. The office involves a talent for 
governing as well as for judging ; talent for fighting 
also, in cases of extremity, and what is still better a 
talent for avoiding to fight. — Carlyle. 

To his own master he standeth or falleih. 
v.- Finite reason standing alone in its own individual- 
ity, has its own peculiar measure, and so its self-in- 
sight has its peculiar clearness, compass, and system- 
atic consistency, and so, too, each finite intelligence 
has knowledge peculiarly its own, and not another's, 
and wherein the knowing is relative to himself, and 
not properly universal. — Hickok. 

I am of the opinion that every mind that comes 
into the world has its own specialty — is different 
from every other mind ; and that every young man 
and every young woman is a failure so long as each 
does not find what is his or her own bias ; that just 
so long as you are influenced by those around you, 
so long as you are attempting to do those things 
which you see others do well, instead of doing that 
thing which you can do well, you are so far wrong, 
so far failing of your own right mark. . . Though 
one may easily be mistaken for a time, yet there is 
in his mind this particular fitness for a calling ; and 
some things that he can do, as in mathematics, or 
in right arrangements of facts ; he being able to dis- 
tribute the duties of the day ; the distribution of 
facts in his mind, so that he understands and can 



244 SELF-INSIGHT, 

recite history better than any other ; or the percep- 
tion of his aim, and keeping that through all the par- 
ticulars by which a logical mind acts, in various ways, 
as some eyes are made for color and some for form. 
— Emerson. 

There are problematic characters who are not 
equal to any situation iii life, and whom no situation 
satisfies. This causes an immense discord within, 
and their whole life is spent without enjoyment. — 
Goethe. 

' No, let them feel that their lame are strong — 
That their courage will fail them never, 

Who strike to repay long years of wrong, 
And bury past shame forever.' 

For if the trumpet give an uncertain sound who 
shall prepare himself to the battle. 

Difficulty and toil give the soul strength to crush 
in a loftier region the passions which draw strength 
only from earth. So long as we listen to the purer 
promptings within us, there is a power invisible, 
though not unfelt which protects us. Amid the toil 
of tumult, and soiling struggle, there is ever an eye 
that watches, ever a heart that overflows with Infi- 
nite and Almighty Love. — Bayard Taylor. 

Self-conquest involves more than the subjugation 
of the body. The mind itself must be under control. 
True Christian manhood includes the power to 
govern the temper, the imagination, the memory, the 



IGNOBLE INFLUENCES. * 245 

taste, the affections. It includes the power of ap- 
plication, of abstraction : the power to direct the 
course of one's thoughts ; and to resist ignoble men- 
tal impulses. 

27. Tasks. — Remember that work consolidates, 
that it puts the needed restrictions, favors revolving 
and essential possession : that there is nothing that 
so compacts and fastens, makes own our meditations 
and attainments, as this agency. If he have, as 
many may, legitimate ulterior tasks and labors, in 
whose performance he delights, and to which he 
looks as his proper life-work, let him keep his eye 
fixed, refusing to forget himself, or become absorbed 
or preoccupied in the subordinate and relative. 

Let there be review and improvement; all the 
work carefully laid out ; not too much undertaken ; 
not too little accepted. There is recognition that we 
are in the midst of temptation, exposure. All the 
agencies may be invoked for arming ; everything that 
can contribute to lift and to hold. 

Man's destiny and function is to do and he decays, 
grows to mere sentimentalism and sickly effeminacy, 
if he apply not his strength to work and the home- 
liest tasks. — Mills. 

Heroism is very homely work in the doing, and 
immortal deeds look prosaic and fool-hardy to the 
mole-eyed worldly wisdom of to-day. — Richardson. 

28. It has been observed, that men of learning 
who take to business discharge it generally with 



246 ■ LEARNING AND HONESTY. 

greater honesty than men of the world. The chief 
reason for it, I take to be, as follows : A man that 
has spent his youth in reading, has been used to find 
virtue extolled, and vice stigmatized. A man that 
has passed his time in the world, has often seen vice 
triumphant, and virtue discountenanced. Extortion, 
rapine, and injustice, which are branded with infamy 
in books, often give a man a figure in the world; 
while several good qualities which are celebrated in 
authors, as generosity, ingenuity, and good nature, 
impoverish and ruin him. This cannot but have a 
proportionable effect on men whose tempers and 
principles are equally good and vicious. — Addison. 

A good tree can not bring forth evil fruit. 

Walter Scott's father. — My father was a singular 
instance of a man' s rising to eminence in a profession 
for which nature had in some degree unfitted him. 
He had, indeed, a turn for labor, and a pleasure in 
analyzing the abstruse feudal doctrines of conveyanc- 
ing, which would probably have rendered him unrival- 
led in the line of a special pleader, had there been such 
a profession in Scotland ; but in the actual business of 
the profession which he embraced, in that sharpened 
intuitive perception which is necessary in driving 
bargains for himself and others, in availing himself 
of the wants, necessities, caprices, and follies of 
some, and guarding against the knaving and malice 
of others, uncle Toby himself could not have con- 
ducted himself with more simplicity than my father. 



THE HONEST LAWYER. 247 

Most attorneys have been suspected more or less 
justly of making their own fortune at the expense 
of their clients : my father's fate was to vindicate 
his calling from the stain in one instance, for in 
many cases his clients contrived to ease him of con- 
siderable sums. Many worshipful and benighted 
names recur to my memory who did him the honor 
to run him in debt to the amount of thousands, and 
to pay him with a law-suit or a commission of bank- 
ruptcy, as the case happened. But they are gone to 
a different accounting, and it would be ungenerous 
to visit their disgrace upon their descendants. He 
had a zeal for his clients which was almost ludicrous: 
far from coldly discharging the duties of his em- 
ployment toward them, he thought for them, felt for 
their honor, as for his own, and rather risked dis- 
obliging them than neglecting anything to which he 
conceived their duty bound them. If there was any 
old mother or aunt to be maintained, he was, I am 
afraid, too apt to administer to their necessities from 
what the young heir had destined his own pleasures. 
Chief Justice HblL — From his start as a magistrate, 
he exceeded the high expectations which had been 
formed of him, and during the long period of twenty- 
two years, he constantly rose in the admiration and 
esteem of his countrymen. To unsullied integrity 
and lofty independence, he added a rare combination 
of deep professional knowledge with exquisite com- 
mon sense. According to a homely but expressive 



248 A GENIUS FOR MAGISTRACY. 

phrase — ' there was no rubbish in his mind.' Famil- 
iar With the practice of the court as any clerk, ac- 
quainted with the rules of special pleading as if he 
had spent all his days and nights in drawing decla- 
rations and demurrers, versed in the subtleties of the 
law of real property, as if he had confined his atten- 
tion to conveyancing, and as a commercial lawyer 
much in advance of any of his contemporaries — he 
ever reasoned logically — appearing at the same time 
instinctively acquainted with all the feelings of the 
human heart, and versed by experience in all the 
ways of mankind. He may be considered as having 
a genius for magistracy as much as our Milton had 
for poetry, or our Wilkie for painting. Perhaps the 
excellence which he attained may be traced to the 
passion for justice by which he was constantly actuat- 
ed. This induced him to sacrifice ease, and amuse- 
ment and literary relaxation, and the allurements of 
party, to submit to tasks the most dull, disagreeable, 
and revolting, and to devote all hi$ energies to one 
object, ever ready to exclaim — 

Welcome business, welcome strife, 
Welcome the cares of ermined life, 
The visage wan, the purblind sight, 
The toil by day, the lamp by night, 
The tedious forms, the solemn prate, 
The pert dispute, the dull debate, 
The drowsy bench, the babbling hall, 
For thee, fair Justice, welcome all 1 



JUDICIAL MODEL. 249 

6 The criminal before him knew that, though his 
spirit was broken with guilt, and incapable of 
language to defend itself, his judge would wrest no 
law to destroy him, nor conceal any that would save 
him. He never spared vice, at the same time he 
could see through the hypocrisy and disguise of those 
who have no pretence to virtue themselves, but by 
their severity to the vicious. — Tatler. 

During a century and a half this country has been 
renowned above all others, for the pure and enlight- 
ened administration of justice: and Holt is the 
model on which, in England, the judicial character 
has been formed. — Campbell. 

Coke. — He had a passionate attachment to his own 
calling — thus he addresses the young beginner: — 
For thy encouragement, cast thine eyes upon the 
sages of the law that have been before thee, and 
never shalt thou find any that hath excelled in the 
knowledge of the laws, but hath sucked from the 
breasts of that divine knowledge, honesty, gravity, 
and integrity, and by the goodness of God hath ob- 
tained a greater blessing than any other profession 
to their family and posterity. — Campbell. 

29. The physician. — Xo class of men in the regu- 
lar discharge of duty incur danger more frequently 
than the honest physician. There is no type of ma- 
lignant maladies with which he fails to become ac- 
quainted ; no hospital so crowded with contagion that ' 
he dares not walk freely through its wards. His 
11* 



250 THE HONEST PHYSICIAN. 

vocation is among the sick and dying ; he is the fa- 
miliar friend of those who are sinking under infec- 
tious disease ; he never shrinks from the horror 
of observing it under all aspects. He must do so 
with equanimity ; as he inhales the poisoned atmos- 
phere, he must coolly reflect on the medicines which 
may mitigate the sufferings that he cannot remedy. 
Nay, after death has ensued, he. must search with the 
dissecting knife for its hidden cause, if so by multi- 
plying his own perils, he may discover some allevia- 
tion for the affliction of others. And why is this ? 
Because the physician is indifferent to death ? Be- 
cause he is steeled and hardened against the fear of 
it ? By no means. It is his especial business to 
value life ; to cherish the spark of animated existence. 
And the habit of caring for lives of his fellow-men is 
far from leading him to habitual indifference to his 
own. The physician shuns every danger but such as 
the glory of his profession commands him to defy.' 

No science has such extensive and intimate con- 
nections witli other sciences. It gathers to itself the 
resources of chemistry, botany, mechanics, compa- 
rative anatomy, and physiology, and mental philo- 
sophy ; and fills its storehouse of facts with a variety 
and abundance sufficient to satisfy the wildest 
and most eager curiosity. The phenomena of life 
even in the healthy condition are exceedingly di- 
versified ; but as modified by disease, and by the 
remedies which are administered, their variations 



MEDICAL SCIENCE. 251 

are never ending. And then the mysterious connec- 
tion of mind and body not only varies them still 
more, but opens to us a mass of facts of a mingled 
mental and physical character, which awaken an in- 
tense interest. The physician looks upon the human 
body, not merely as a machine filled with contrivan- 
ces so cunning and elaborate as to render all the 
mechanism of man in the comparison rude and 
bungling : but as a machine instinct with life, hav- 
ing a living nerve attached to every fibre of it. 

The details of a science which treats of phenomena 
so interesting in their character, and so wide in their 
range, are never dry and uninteresting, as the details 
of other sciences sometimes are. There are no tedi- 
ous technicalities, no dull abstractions — no tiresome 
monotony. There is, therefore, an absorbing en- 
thusiasm in the pursuit of medical science, which 
makes its votary disregard the loathsomeness of pu- 
trefaction and even forget danger in his search after 
truth. — Hooker. 

9. Greeley. — His very name a title-page, and next 

His life a commentary on the text. — Woodbridge. 

My life has been busy and anxious, but not joyless. 
Whether it shall be prolonged few or more years, I 
am grateful that it has endured so long, and that it 
has abounded in opportunities for good not wholly 
unimproved, and in experiences of the nobler as well 
as the baser im pulses of human nature. I have 
been spared to see the end of giant wrongs, which I 



252 THE HONEST JOURNALIST. 

once deemed invincible in this century, and to note 
the silent upspringing and growth of principles and 
influences which I hail as destined to root out some 
of the most flagrant and pervading evils that yet 
remain. I realize that each generation is destined 
to confront new and peculiar trials — to wrestle with 
temptations and seductions unknown to its predeces- 
sors : yet I trust that progress is a general law of 
our being, and that the ills and woes of the future 
shall be less crushing than those of the bloody and 
hateful past. So, looking calmly, yet humbly, for 
that close of my mortal career which cannot be far 
distant, I reverently thank God for the blessings 
vouchsafed me in the past, and with an awe that is 
not fear, and a consciousness of demerit which does 
not exclude hope, await the opening before my steps 
of the gates of the eternal world. — Greeley. 

Before the burial. — Now, now, we measure at its worth, 

The gracious presence gone forever ! 
The wrinkled East that gave him birth, 

Laments with every laboring river ; 
Wild moan the free winds of the West 

For him who gathered to her prairies 
The sons of men, and made each crest 

The haunt of happy household fairies. 

The tears that fall from eyes unused, — 
The hands above his grave united, — 

The words of men whose lips he loosed, 

Whose cross he bore, whose wrongs he righted, — 

Could he but know, and rest with this ! 



THE HONEST JOURNALIST. 253 

Yet, stay through Death's low-lying hollow, 
i His one last foe's insatiate hiss 

On that benignant shade would follow ! 

— Stedmax. 

Prentice to Greeley. — 

But thou hast well fufilled thy trust, 

Still foremost mid thy fellow-men, 
Though in each year of all thy time, 

Thou hast compressed three-score and ten ; — 
For I have marked thy strong career 

As traced by thy own sturdy pen. 

In this one man is shown a temperance, proof 
Against all trials : industry -severe 
And constant as the motion of the day : 
Stern self-denial round him spread, with shade 
That might be deemed forbidding, did not there 
All generous feelings flourish and rejoice. 

— Wordsworth. 1 

This concord of a well-tuned mind 

Hath been so set by that all-working hand 

Of heaven, that though the world done its worst 

To put it out by discords most unkind : 

Yet doth it still in perfect union stand 

With God and man. — Daniel. 

10. Labor — Ye said also. Behold zvhat a vjeariness 
is it ! 

Calvin. — What shall I say of his indefatigable 
industry, almost beyond the power of nature, which 
paralleled with our loiterings, will, I fear, exceed all 
credit ? It may be the truest object of admiration, 



254 MODERN WEARINESS. 

how one lean, worn, spent, and wearied body could 
hold out. He read, every week of the year through, 
three divinity-lectures ; every other week, over and 
above he preached every day ; so that, (as Erasmus 
said of Chrysostom) I know not whether more to 
admire his constancy, or theirs that heard him. Some 
have reckoned his yearly lectures to be 186, and his 
yearly sermons 286. Every Thursday he sat in the 
presbytery ; every Friday when the ministers met to 
consult upon difficult texts, he made as good as a lec- 
ture. Besides all this, there was scarce a day that 
exercised him not in answering either by word of 
mouth or writing, the doubts and questions of different 
churches and pastors ; yea, sometimes more than 
once : so that he might say with Paul, ' The care of all 
churches lieth upon me : ' scarcely a year wherein, 
over and above all these employments, some great 
volume in folio came not forth.' — Hoyt. 

4 1 saw Italy only to leave it,' said Calvin with a 
sigh. Returning to France he sold the property 
which he had inherited from his father — and set out 
for Strasburg. Yet not without regret did he leave 
his native France. ' Every step toward the border 
costs me tears,' he said, ' yet, if the truth cannot dwell 
in France, I will not.' . . Calvin at once gave 
himself to the work of making Geneva a Christian 
city. The rigor with which he assailed the customs 
of a pleasure-loving people awakened at length a 
growing opposition,, and in 1538 he was banished 



CALVIN REFORMING GENEVA. 255 

from the city. Near the close of the year 1540, the 
authorities of Geneva besought Calvin to return to 
their city. The years of his absence — years of tumult 
and disorder in Geneva — had borne witness to the 
value of his presence and teaching. Calvin was now 
firmly established in Strasburg. He had married 
there also, and had little desire moreover, to mingle 
again in the stormy scenes which he had witnessed 
iu Geneva. Yet, he could not refuse the call ; and 
he set out for Geneva saying : ' I bring my bleeding 
heart a sacrifice to the Lord.' People came forth 
in crowds to meet him : before his death, in 1564, 
such a change had been wrought in that once gay 
and thoughtless city that Farel, pointing to Geneva, 
could say : ' There the pure Gospel is preached in all 
temples and houses : there the music of psalms never 
ceases : there hands are folded and hearts arc lifted 
up to heaven from morning till night ! ' — Burrage. 

Robertson at Oxford. — His friends were sought 
among the thinking, the literary, the devout-minded, 
and intellectual men of his day. Light and trivial, 
or foolish conversation was always most abhorrent 
to him. His idea and endeavor with respect to 
social enjoyment were mental gain or spiritual im- 
provement. 

Mere recreation or mere amusement were regard- 
ed by him as little better than waste of time. The 
common every-clay talk, the joke, the sharp repartee 
of men fresh from public schools and elated with 



256 <A GODLY AND SOBER LIFE.' 

youthful spirits, found no sympathy in his breast, 
and were positively distasteful to him. He would 
often say with emphasis : ' To think that men should 
have nothing better to converse about than all this 
trash ! ' His turn of mind led him to an almost 
contemptuous dislike for what he called ' the froth, 
the scum, the vanity of all these things ! ' — Clarke. 

Robertson at Brighton. — ' I cannot describe to you 
in words the strange sensation, during his sermon, 
of union with him and communion with one another 
which filled us as he spoke. Nor can I describe to 
you the sense we had of a higher Presence, — the 
sacred awe which filled our hearts, — the hushed still- 
ness in which the smallest sound was startling, — the 
calmed eagerness of men who listened as if waiting 
for a word of revelation to resolve the doubt or to 
heal the sorrow of a life, — the unexpected light which 
came upon the faces of some when an expression 
struck home and made them feel, — in a moment of 
high relief from pain or doubt, — this man speaks to 
me, and his words are inspired by God. And when 
the close came, and silence almost awful fell upon 
the church, even after a sigh of relief from strained 
attention had ceased to come from all the congrega- 
tion, I have often seen men so wrapt that they could 
not move till the sound of the organ aroused them to 
the certainty that the preacher had ceased to speak.' J 

Judson. — No description could convey the peculiar 
impression of his manner, — so quiet, so simple and 



THE POWER OF GODLINESS. 257 

humble, yet breathing a hush, a thrill through the 
assembly, such as I have never witnessed elsewhere. 
We felt that we were in the presence of one who had 
' entered within the vail,' one conversant beyond 
most of his fellow-men with the mysteries of the in- 
visible world, and whose life was ' hid with Christ in 
God.' — Mrs. Conant. 

For the priest's lips should keep knowledge, and 
they should seek the law at his mouth : for he is the 
messenger of the Lord of hosts. 

10. The Prophet. — The Lord God will raise up unto 
thee a Prophet from the midst of thee, of thy brethren. 

Prophecy. — ' Gift of insight.' — ' Power of explain- 
ing truth.' — ' A declaration of the divine prescience, 
looking at any distance through a train of infinite 
causes known and unknown to us, upon a sure and 
certain effect.' 

A Revelation to be satisfactory, must be complete, 
harmonious in itself, and addressed to the world 
through living teachers. — Independent. 

The prophetic state : — The bodily senses were 
closed to external objects as in deep sleep. The 
reflective and discursive faculty was still and inac- 
tive. The spiritual faculty was awakened to the 
highest state of energy. Hence it is, that revelations 
in trances are described by the prophets as ' seen ' 
or 4 heard ' by them ; for the spiritual faculty ener- 
gizes by immediate perception on the part of the in- 
ward sense, not by inference and thought. — Smith. 



258 PROPHETIC CONDITIONS. 

* While watching on our arms at night, 
We heard thy call, we felt thy light. — ' 

And I turned to see the voice that spake with me — 
like unto the son of man. 

I, John, ivho am also your brother and companion 
in tribulation. 

For in -the case of every prophet, the divine ele- 
ment in him comes into contact with sin in his con- 
temporaries, and the closer their relation in the flesh, 
the more incomprehensible to the worldly man is 
their wide separation in the spirit. The spectacle of 
the prophet entangled in the same irritating cares of 
daily life, that are common to all his fellows, rendered 
it more difficult under this lowly guise to recognize 
his heaveiily character. — Olshausen. 

31oses. — With him will I speak mouth to mouth — 
and the similitude of the Lord shall he behold. 

When we see him at the Burning Bush sacrificing 
his diffidence to his duty, and resolving finally to 
attempt the first great liberation of mankind ; — when 
we trace him through the wonders of Sinai, and of 
the wilderness, when we mark his steady faith in 
God, his undoubting obedience to every divine com- 
mand ; his unexampled patriotism, immovable by 
ingratitude, rebellion, and insult ; his cheerful com- 
munication of every office of power and profit to 
others, and his equally cheerful exclusion of his own 
descendants from all places of distinction ; when we 
consider his glorious integrity in adhering always to 



THE GREATEST PROPHET. 259 

the duties of his office, unseduced by power and splen- 
dor, unmoved by national and singular homage, un- 
awed by faction and opposition, undaunted by danger 
and difficulty, and unaltered by provocation, obloquy, 
and distress ; when we see him meek beyond example, 
and patient and persevering through forty years of 
declining life, in toil, hazard, and trial ; when we 
read in his writings the frank records of his own fail- 
ings and that of his family, friends, and nation, and 
the first efforts of the historian, the poet, the orator, 
and the lawgiver ; when we see all the duties of self- 
government, benevolence, and piety, which he taught 
exactly displayed in a life approximating to angelic 
virtue ; when we behold him the deliverer of his 
nation, the restorer of truth, the pillar of righteous- 
ness, and the reformer of mankind : his whole char- 
acter shines with a radiance like the splendor which 
his face derived from the Son of Righteousness, and 
on which the human eye could not endure to look. 
He is everywhere the same glorious person ; the man 
of God, selected from the race of Adam, called up 
into the mountain that burned with fire ; ascending 
to meet his Creator ; embosoming himself in the 
clouds of Sinai ; walking calmly onward through 
the thunders and lightnings; and serenely ad- 
vancing to the immediate presence and converse of 
Jehovah. He is the greatest of all prophets ; the 
first type of the Saviour, conducted to Pisgah, un- 
clothed of mortal flesh and entombed in the dust by 
the immediate hand of the Most High. — Dwight. 



260 THE PERFECT HISTORIAN. 

11. The perfect historian is he in whose work the 
character and spirit of an age is exhibited in minia- 
ture. He relates no fact, he attributes no expression 
to his characters, which is not authenticated bjr suffi- 
cient testimony. But by judicious selection, rejection, 
and arrangement, he gives to truth those attractions 
which have been usurped by fiction. In his narra- 
tive a due subordination is observed ; some transac- 
tions are prominent, others retire. But the scale on 
which he represents them is increased or diminished, 
not according to the dignity of the persons concerned 
in them, but according to the degree in which they 
elucidate the condition of society and the nature of 
man. He considers no anecdote, no peculiarity of 
mind, no familiar saying as too insignificant for his 
notice, which is not too insignificant to illustrate the 
operation of laws, of religion, and of education, and 
to mark the progress of the human mind. Men will 
not merely be described, but will be made intimately 
known to us. — Mac aula y. 

History with faithful Genius at the top, and faith- 
ful Industry at the bottom will then be capable of be- 
ing written. History will then actually be written — 
the inspired gift of God — employing itself to illumi- 
nate the dark ways of God — a thing pressingly need- 
ful to be done, whereby modern nations may again 
become a little less godless, and again have several 
things they are still more fatally in want of at 
present. — Carlyle. 



MORAL DARKNESS. 261 

. 12. The dark ages. — 

Strange, salt)- odors through the darkness steal, 
And through the dark the ocean thunders roll ; 
Thick darkness gathers stifling, till I feel 
Its weight upon my soul. 
I strain my eves into the heavy night — 
Blackness of Darkness ! ' 

Christianity entered into the race and the individ- 
ual as a new life — a regeneration — awakening new 
principles of action, new motives and affections, 
creating aspirations after holiness for its own sake. — 
Blake. 

At the close of the third century after Christ, the 
prospects of mankind were fearfully dreary. Philo- 
sophy remained stationary. 

A (Roman) sovereign almost invisible ; a crowd 
of dignitaries minutely distinguished by badges and 
titles ; rhetoricians who said nothing but what had 
been said ten thousand times ; schools in which no- 
thing was taught but what had been known for ages 
— such was the machinery provided for the govern- 
ment and instruction of the most enlightened part of 
the human race. That great community was then 
in danger of experiencing a calamity far more terri- 
ble than any of the quick, inflammatory, destroying 
maladies, to which nations are liable — a tottering, 
drivelling, paralytic longevity, the immortality of the 
Struldbrugs, a Chinese civilization. 

From this miserable state the Western Empire was 
saved by the fiercest and most destroying visitation 



262 THE NORTHERN INVASION. 

with which God has ever' chastened his creatures — 
the invasion of the northern nations. Such a cure 
was required for such a distemper. The fire of Lon- 
don, it has been observed, was a blessing. It burned 
down the city, but it burned out the plague. The 
same may be said of the tremendous devastation of 
the Roman dominions. It annihilated the noisome 
recesses in which lurked the seeds of great moral 
maladies ; it cleared an atmosphere fatal to the 
health and vigor of the human mind. It cost Europe 
a thousand years of barbarism to escape the fate of 
China. At length, the terrible purification was ac- 
complished ; and the second civilization of mankind 
commenced, under circumstances which afforded a 
strong security that it would never retrograde and 
never pause. — Macaulay. 

Retrogressions of the human intellect. — It is curious 
that in the most disturbed period of this turbulent 
reign (King Henry III.), when ignorance seemed to 
be thickening and the human intellect to decline, 
there was written and given to the world the best 
treatise upon law of which England could boast till 
the publication of Blackstone's Commentaries in the 
middle of the eighteenth century. For comprehen- 
siveness, for lucid arrangement, for logical precision, 
this author (Bracton) was unrivalled during many 
acres. — Campbell. 

There is no part of English history since the Con- 
quest, so uncertain, so little authentic or consistent, 



REVOLUTIONS, 263 

as that of the wars between the two Roses : and it is 
remarkable that this profound darkness falls upon 
us just on the eve of the restoration of letters, and 
when the art of printing was already known in 
Europe. All that we can distinguish with certainty 
through the deep cloud which covers that period, is 
a scene of horror and bloodshed, savage manners, 
arbitrary executions, and treacherous, dishonorable 
conduct in all parties. — Hume. 

Revolutions. — Periods of Revolution bring out and 
develop extraordinary characters ; they produce 
saints and heroes, and they produce also fanatics and 
fools and villains ; but they are unfavorable to the 
action of average conscientious men, and to the ap- 
plication of the plain principles of right and wrong 
to every-day life. Common men at such times see 
all things changing round them, — institutions falling 
to ruin ; religious truth no longer an awful and un- 
disputed reality, but an opinion shifting from hour 
to hour ; and they are apt to think that, after all, 
interest is the best object for which to live, and that 
in the general scramble those are the wisest who 
best take care of themselves. 

Meanwhile, a vast intellectual revolution, of which 
the religious reformation was rather a sign than a 
cause, was making its way in the English mind. 
The discovery of the form of the earth and of its 
place in the planetary system was producing an effect 
on the imagination which long familiarity with the 



264 ASTRONOMICAL DISCOVERIES. 

truth renders it hard for us now to realize. The 
very heaven itself had been rolled up like a scroll, 
laying bare the illimitable abyss of space ; the solid 
frame of the earth had become a transparent ball, 
and in a hemisphere below their feet, men saw the 
sunny Palm Isles and the golden glories of the tropic 
seas. Long impassive, long unable from the very 
toughness of their natures to apprehend these novel 
wonders, indifferent to them, even hating themes at 
first they hated the doctrines of Luther, the English 
opened their eyes at last. In the convulsions which 
rent England from the Papacy, a thousand supersti- 
tions were blown away ; a thousand new thoughts 
rushed in, bringing with them their train of new 
desires and new emotions : and when the fire was 
once kindled, the dry wood burnt fiercely in the 
wind. — Froude. 

G-en. Monk and the Restoration. — Revolutions leave 
so much distrust and distaste for violent proceedings 
in the minds of all men of sense who have gone 
through them, that they feel a repugnance to have re- 
course to them themselves, even when their employ- 
ment seems easy and their success assured. 

The more important the step which Monk had 
taken, the more determined was he to do nothing 
precipitately, and to go no further until the propi- 
tious moment arrived when he could act under the 
pressure of necessity, and with the appearance of 
legality. His good sense and practical experience 



THE RESTORATION. 265 

had taught him that, in order to exert a powerful 
influence over men, whether friends or enemies, it 
is necessary to act in the. name of some acknowl- 
edged right, some undisputed principle, which may 
serve as a starting-point and standard in action. He 
had now found, or to speak more correctly, events 
had supplied him with the support so necessary to 
his first steps on the difficult course on which he had 
entered. He had now a legitimate right to use the 
cloak with which he had hitherto covered his real 
purpose; his acts were sanctioned by the last sur- 
viving representatives of that Old Parliament whose 
servant he professed himself to be. 

On the very day after the Restoration the court and 
the puritans were the two hostile forces which appear- 
ed at the two opposite extremities of the political 
arena. 

The period of civil war was passed ; that of par- 
liamentary conflicts and compromises was beginning. 
The sway of Protestant religion and the decisive 
influence of the country in its own government — 
these were the objects which Revolutionary England 
had pursued. Though cursing the revolution and 
calling it the rebellion, Royalist England neverthe- 
less prepared still to pursue these objects, and not 
to rest till she had attained them. — Guizot. 

English liberty had been the slow fruit of ages, 
still waiting a happier season for its perfect ripe- 
ness, but already giving proof of the vigor and 
12 



266 THE DIVINE COUNSELS. 

industry which had been employed in its culture. — 
Hallam. 

13. The Divine Counsels. — He causeth it to come, 
whether for correction, or for his land, or for mercy. 
And it is turned round about by his counsels, that he 
may do whatever he commandeth them. 

'' Every now and then, God brings the human race 
to a crisis. t The times become grand and solemn. 
The soul of the race seems to vibrate to its remotest 
extremities.' 

Kings are lifted up ot thrown down ; nations come 
and go ; republics flourish and wither ; dynasties 
pass away like a tale that is told ; but nothing is by 
chance, though men in their ignorance of causes may 
think so. The caprice of fleeting existences bends 
to the immovable omnipotence which has neither 
change of purpose nor repose. Sometimes like a 
messenger through the thick darkness of night, it 
steps along mysterious ways, but when the hour 
strikes for a people or for mankind to pass into a 
new form of being, unseen hands draw the bolts from 
the gates of futurity ; an all-subduing influence pre- 
pares the mind of men for the coming revolution : 
those who plan resistance find themselves in conflict 
with the will of Providence rather than with human 
devices ; and all hearts and all understandings, most 
of all the opinions and influences of the unwilling 
are wonderfully attracted and compelled to bear for- 
ward the change which becomes more an obedience 



THE FULNESS OP TIME. 267 

to the law of universal nature, than submission to the 
arbitrament of man. — Bancroft. 

How long shall it be to the end of these wonders ? 

God's kingdom in this world goes on secretly and 
silently and hiddenly, both in the individual and the 
community ; and is often disclosed as a thing ac- 
complished, long after men have given over hope and 
expectation. — Beecher. 

The race has entered on the period when its pre- 
vious education has ripened, and truth begins to 
bring forth her perfect fruits. . . Having thus 
traced man's progress from unconsciousness to in- 
stinct, from instinct to discipline, from discipline 
to faith and liberty, the inquiry naturally arises, 
whether in these, so far as they shall be manifested 
orexperienced on earth, the race will find its last 
stage of advancement? To this question, that great 
eternal future which shall open to all of us, can alone 
supply the full response. Yet as to the nature of 
that response, revelation offers no indistinct intima- 
tions. — Blakf. 

17. Where there is no vision the people perish. 

When truth ceases to go out of us as action, it 
will soon cease to come in to us as vision. The 
greatest souls of history have not been those to 
whom the finest visions were vouchsafed : but those 
who have not disobeyed the visions they have beheld 
while others slept the sleep of sense and sin. And 
the great, nation is not of necessity the nation that 



268 APOSTASY. 

has embodied them in her customs, processes-, and 
laws.— Chadwick. 

Present Apostasy. — Because my people hath for- 
gotten me, they have burned incense to vanity and they 
have caused them to stumble in their ways from the 
ancient paths. — 

There are none of us willing to admit that the 
human race is going backward, and yet we cannot 
deny that there are great counter-currents of evil, 
which sometimes seem to check the moral progress 
of a people. Such an one seems flowing out from 
the war. — M. C. A. 

The forty-second Congress will be chiefly remem- 
bered for scandalous exposures which have not been 
followed by purification ; delinquencies of members 
which have not. been punished ; and the discovery 
of abuses in the public service without a consequent 
reformation. — Tribune. 

For every one from the least even unto the greatest 
is given to covetousness. 

Reforms. — It is a curious illustration of the exist- 
ing condition of society that the principal difficulties 
of reform conventions should be in finding thrust 
upon them as candidates men who are in reality neces- 
sarily opposed to all their plans. Indeed, these reform 
commotions, both in the prodigious heat and energy 
displayed at first, and the extreme ignorance and 
gullibility exhibited in the later stages, have rather 
an Asiatic than an American look, and sometimes 



REFORMS. 269 

has seen the most majestic • visions of the right 
and true, but the nation which having seen them 
make one think that the world may be slowly work- 
ing its way back ' down the ringing grooves' of Pro- 
gress to that condition of society in which reform 
movements consist of alternate advances, devasta- 
tions, and retreats of vast hordes of semi-barbarous 
men under the leadership of powerful chieftains 
who live -partly on the plunder of the enemy and 
partly on that of their subjects. — Nation. 

For among my people, are found wicked men : — they 
set a trap, they catch men. 

They are ivaxenfat, they shine : — they judge not the 
cause, the cause of the fatherless, yet they prosper ; 
and the right of the needy do they not judge. Shall 1 
not visit for these things? saith the Lord. 

The Gorl who with his finger drew 

The judgment coming on, — 
Write for these men what must ensue 
Ere many years be gone ! — Dickexs. 
20. National Judgments. — 

1 Tremendous judgments from thy .hand 
Thy dreadful power display.* 

Extracts from the Evening Postfs summary of the 
year. — Jan. 4. Violent and unusual shocks of earth- 
quake in England. 

1-8. In Philadelphia 230 persons die of small-pox. 

12. Small-pox spreads in all parts of England, 
Scotland, and Ireland. 



270 < EARTHQUAKES IN DIVERS PLACES. ' 

19. Great earthquake at Shemache, Causas ; 13T . 
killed, 44 wounded, and te hcity ruined. 

26. Terrible floods in England, with immense loss 
of property. 

Feb. 4. Remarkable aurora witnessed in America, 
Europe, Asia, and the southern hemisphere. 

19. A Boston paper of to-day reports 27 persons 
frozen to death, 34 cases of crime, and an earth- 
quake. 

March 26. Dreadful earthquake in California; 
1,500 miles of country shaken ; 40 people killed, 100 
wounded. Seven thousand shocks were felt in three 
days. 

27. Destructive earthquake at Oaxaca, Mexico. 
Apr. 3. Antioch destroyed by a great earthquake 

that caused the death of two thousand persons; ten 
thousand houses burnt at Jeddo. 

5. Ten tons of obscene literature seized in New 
York. 

16. An earthquake at Memphis. 

25-27. Grand eruption of Vesuvius and loss of 
two hundred lives. The most terrible for two centu- 
ries. 

28. Strike of two thousand cartmen at Liverpool. 
May 11. Riot and strike of fifteen hundred miners 

in Michigan. 

12. The great strikes in New York and Brooklyn 
begin. 

June 19. It is reported that a strange plague in 



NATIONAL JUDGMENTS. 271 

three towns in Brazil had destroyed eight tnousand 
people out of a population of thirteen thousand. 

20. Twenty thousand miners on a strike in 
Germany. 

21. Revolution in Peru with fearful carnage. 

28. Iluge sun spots seen many days. 

August 14. Great heat and awful convulsions of 
the atmosphere. 

15. Great riots in Belfast, Ireland. 

17. A three weeks' strike of shoe-makers ends" at 
Lynn. 

29. Cholera in India and West Russia. • *■* 
Sep. 9. Fifteen or twenty thousand Indians onlhe 

war path in Yellowstone Yalley. 

17. New and fatal cattle plague in Nevada. 

18. Defalcation of 8180,000 in the United States' 
Treasury in New York. 

24. Great Britain suffering from coal famine, great 
rains, potato-rot and poor harvests. 

29. Great gales, and immense losses in the western 
lakes. 

Oct. 1. The strange horse epizootic begins in On- 
tario — in two months time attacks nearly five million 
horses. 

2. The famous Escurial in Spain struck by light- 
ning and damaged $200,000. 

5. Spain sends fourteen thousand more troops to 
Cuba. 

10. It is announced in Persia that three million 
persons have died of famine and plague. 



272 EESURRECTION. 

Nov. 9-10. Terrible conflagration in Boston. 
Loss about $100,000,000 

18. In . Russia eighty thousand people have died 
up to this time of cholera. 

3. Gas stokers strike in London. 

17. Awful storms and floods in -France and Eng- 
land. 

c Vast magazines of plagues and storms 
Lie treasured for his foes/ 

If that nation against whom I have pronounced evil 
turn from their evil, I will repent of the evil I 
thought to do unto them. 

( No more the sovereign eye of God 
O'erlooks the crimes of men/ 

25th December! — Silently the month advances. 
There is nothing to destroy but much to bury. Bu- 
ry, then, thou snow, that slumberously fallest 
through the still air, the hedge-rows of leaves ! . 
Muffle thy cold wool about the feet of shivering trees ! 
Bury all that the year hath known, and let thy bril- 
liant stars, that never shine as they do in thy frostiest 
nights, behold the work ! But know, O month of 
destruction, that in thy constellation is set that Star 
whose rising is the sign, forevermore, that there is 
life in death ! Thou art the month of Resurrection. 
In thee, the Christ came. Every star that looks 
upon thy labor and toil of burial, knows that all 
things shall come forth again. Storms shall sob 



VISION OF HARVEST. 273 

themselves to sleep. Silence shall find a voice. 
Death shall live, Life shall rejoice. — Beecher. 

And it caraz to pass on a certain day as he was 
teaching ) that there were Pharisees and doctors of the 
law sitting by which were come out of every town of 
Galilee and Judea and Jerusalem: and the power of 
the Lord was present to heal them. . 

The sea of Galilee has no sacred associations but 
those of the New Testament. One peaceful presence 
dwells undisturbed on its shores and its waters from 
end to end. 

It was still winter or early spring : four months 
yet to the harvest, and the bright, golden ears of 
those fields had not yet whitened their golden ex- 
panse of verdure. But at he gazed upon thenar, they 
served to present the glorious vision of the distant 
harvest of the Gentile world, which with each suc- 
cessive turn of the conversation unfolded itself more 
distinctly before him as he sate absorbed in the open- 
ing prospect.^ — silent amid his silent and astonished 
disciples.— Stanley. 

Ask for me and I will give thee the heathen for thine 
inheritance, and the uttermost part of the earth for 
thy possession. 

i See a long race thy spacious courts adorn, 
See future sons and daughters yet unborn, 
In crowding ranks on every side arise 
Demanding life, impatient for the skies. 
See barbarous nations at thy gate attend, 
12* 



274 SACKED LOVE. 

Walk in thy light and in thy temple bend : 

See thy bright altars thronged with prostrate kings, 

While every land its joyous tribute brings.' 

Christ speaks, and at once generations become his 
by stricter, closer ties than those of blood — by the 
most sacred, most indissoluble of all unions. He 
• lights up the flame of love which consumes self-love, 
which prevails over every other love. In this won- 
derful power of his will we recognize the Word that 
created the world. — Napoleon. 

He tasted death for every man. 

An eternal glory has been shed upon the human 
race by the love Christ bore to it. And as love 
provokes love, many have found it possible to con- 
ceive for Christ an attachment the closeness of 
which no words can describe, a veneration so possess- 
ing and absorbing the man within them, that they 
have said, ' I live no more, but Christ lives in me.' 
Now such a feeling carries with it . of necessity the 
feeling of love for all human beings. It matters no . 
longer what quality men may exhibit, amiable or 
unamiable, as the brothers of Christ, as belonging 
to His sacred and consecrated kind, as the objects of 
His love in life and death, they must be dear to all 
to whom He is dear. And those who would for a mo- 
ment know His heart and understand His life, must 
begin with thinking of the whole race with awful rev- 
erence and hope. — Ecce Homo. 

27. Confidence in Truth. — Christ believed that His 



CONFIDENCE IN. TRUTH. 275 

mission was of God, the purpose which he was un- 
folding and executing was God's ; and the infinite 
resources of. God were pledged to its realization. 
He looked to that universal providence which in- 
cludes rnind as well as matter, and to its mighty 
combinations and agencies. He looked to the over- 
flowing and inexhaustible fountain of spiritual influ- 
ences, and his confidence' was untroubled and serene. 
— Young. 

How little and mean is the confidence of man in 
God ! — Luther. 

The plain fact is, that confidence in truth is not a 
common thing in the world, even in the nominally 
Christian world. He who loves the truth will of 
course defend it in his turn — will fight for it, and be 
spit upon for it, and if need be, die for it, being very 
zealous for its honor, and ambitious for its triumphs : 
but he will not distrust it. Like Luther, he will take 
heart by looking up to the unsupported skies — seeing 
God where no visible secrets are. He will confide 
in the truth because it is of God ; and will as soon 
expect the stars to fall, as the heavenly arch of truth. 
And there are two streams that flow to fill the channel 
of his faith ; one out of the nature of truth itself, and 
the other out of the fields of history. Reposing on this 
.ennobling trust, he will valiantly believe that error, 
though built into, broad-based and solid pyramids, 
will crumble to the dust under the feet of marching 
centuries, and that truth though it be burned in the 



276 CON-FIDENCE IN TRUTH. 

hottest flames, will, like .the phoenix, reappear and 
live again.- — Helmer. 

I am not afraid of God's providences. Not afraid 
they will ever overthrow grace. Not afraid of man. 
And if it pleases God to develop new truths, to make 
larger, disclosures, to give higher revelations of moral 
life, to open spheres for purer and nobler experiences : 
— these things are to be ours. And. as from the 
beginning, we have had solid truth that served the 
cause of religion, so we shall have solid truth that 
shall serve the cause of religion to the end. — Beecher. 

Tlierefbre will riot we fear though the earth be re* 
moved, and though the mountains be carried into the 
midst of the sea. 

1 And he in mercy loving, 

Through weariness of years, 
\Vas kept unto the proving 

Of hopes that knew not fears. 
In him when others faltered 

Before the storm that blew, 
His mighty soul unaltered 

By error's specious view : 
Stormed in vain, 
With no strain. 
Stood up unmoved and true.' 

There is nothing nobler than faith, unwavering 
and unchanging in to-morrow and next year ; in the 
unattempted, the untried, the unborn : the inherent, 
and unconquerable belief that our work, however 



THE MILLENNIAL DAY. 277 

humble anddowly, will, if earnest, result in good, and 
bring forth fruit acceptable in the eyes of the univer- 
sal Father who sees the smallest flower bloom, 

1 And from the acorn rears the oak/ — Fro tinge: am. 
30. Where is the promise of his coming ? 

When shall these gloomy shadows be withdrawn 
And on us burst the effulgence of the dawn ? 

The bright, immortal morn ? — Tarbox. 

E'en now o'er the mountain it seems to me 

That a streak of gray appears : 
My God ! can it be that I see aright ? 

Can it be that the morning nears ? — J. A. S. 

' It is coming sure and onward ! 

Coming from the realms of day ! 
While the spirit looking sunward, 

Like an eagle sees the ray. 

When the words of love shall waken 
World-wide fires in hearts of men; 

When the spirit shall be shaken- 
Till it finds its God a^ain.' 

God is the spring of pure being : separated from 
him by ignorance or false views, by conscious guilt, 
distrust or enmity, the soul carries in it the seeds 
of death, and in order to live, it must be restored to 
God, and God must be restored to its knowledge, 
confidence, and love.— Young. 



INDEX. 

Page. 

A Biographer at Work 52 

Abstinence from Meats * 58 

A Difficult Task P 51 

A Fall 91 

A Genius for Magistracy 248 

A Heathenish Custom 74 

A Kingly Appearance 155 

Albert 133 

A Lesson of Poverty 191 

A Mine Un worked 210 

American Desert 205 

Analogies 97 

An American Poet 211 

A Pagan Nation 127 

A Pint of Water 136 

Appreciation ' 165 

A Preacher's Power 190 

A Plain Allegory 195 

Assurance 17 

Apostasy 268 

A Strong Mind 114 

Asia 116 

Astrology 143 

Berlin 98 

Beauty ...... ^. . . 158 

Blessedness . . . • 39 



280 INDEX. 

Broken Covenants . . 75 

Buckle > . 223 

Calvin . . 255 

Celestial Powers . . . . . 200 

Christ 34 

Chance. . ........ . . ......... 63 

Church Power 152 

Clive. 130 

Clear Visien 236 

Conscience. .......' 151 

Coleridge % 216 

Contemplation 181 

Confidence in Truth 275 

Dana and Halleck . 213 

Dejection . 66 

Demeanor 107 

Distrust 20 

Divine Pity , 93 

Diviner Fruit , 187 

•Discoveries 198 

Diabolical Sneers 228 

Dreams . . . . 146 

Du Guesclin's Valuation , 166 

Earthquakes in Divers Places . . 270 

Education. 101 

Edomites 119 

Elizabeth. . . 79 

Encouragement 26 

Errors • • 92 . 

Erskine . i , 145 

Estrangement , 168 



INDEX. 281 

Eternity and Time 196 

Europe ...... 115 

Evil-speaking ; . . . 112 

Evil Counter-currents .....' 125 

Excision 25 

Faith . 19 

False Philosophy 45 

Fire from Heaven 150 

Forests 96 

Fresh Oil , 48 

Frivolity 65 

Freemasonry 167 

Fulness of Time 267 

Genius 219 

German Peasantry 120 

God's Truth 46 

Growths of Civilization 67 

Greatness 86 

Greeley 251 

Hard Work 31 

Hastings ; 131 

Happiness 175 

His Work..... 35 

His Father is a King 57 

Household Spies 113 

Human Perfection 230 

Ignoble Influences 245 

Impartiality . . . . , 154 

Imperial Greatness 233 

Jewish Brethren. . . . 124 

Judson 128 



282 INDEX. 

Judgment to Come 148 

Judicial Model 249 

King Henry's Penance 60 

Knowledge of Evil . 185 

Land and Labor 139 

Learning and Honesty 246 

Lone Things • . . . . 178 

Lincoln , 182 

Literature. 177 

May Day 95 

Maximilian 132 

Mitchell 72 

Mixed Motives 43 

Moral Eminence 184 

Moral Darkness 261 

Modern Weariness . ... 254 

Mystery 28 

Nature 99 

National Judgments " 271 

Nothing to Confer 68 

North America 117 

October 204 

Old Age 203 

Omnipresence 5 

Originality 189 

Philosophical Proof. 197 

Progression , 12 

Prayer . 13 

Preparation » 37 

Pretty Things , ; 76 

Predestination 89 



INDEX. 283 

Predictions.. • 147 

Prophetic .Conditions 258 

Punishment Delayed. . . . . . ••••;. 126 

Reproof. 94 

Real Perspective. 172 

Revolutions . 262 

Reforms 269 

Resurrection 272 

Robertson 55 

Sacred Love 274 

Sacrifice 232 

Self denial 32 

Self-insight 243 

September ' 174 

Simplicity of Genius * 225 

Sir Eardly Wilmot . 239 

Sir William Temple 240 

Sorrow 23 

Sorrow of Genius 226 

Sulemn Trusts 237 

Spanish Women 122 

Stanton 192 

Steadfast .170 

Strength 185 

Superstition 142 

Sublime Creation 206 

Switzerland 207 

Talbot's Composition 156 

The Cathedral ' 221 

The Difference. . . 169 

The Divine Counsels 266 

The Eclipse. , . .-. 134 



284 INDEX. 

The Eternal Now 7 

The English Language 217 

The Hand of God. , 145 

The Heart's Unknown . . . . . . 24 

The Honest Lawyer k 247 

The Honest Physician. 250 

The Honest Journalist 251 

The Ideal Union . 160 

The Imagination 208 

The Infinite Personal Reason 4 

The Indwelling Deity 202 

The Jew 123 

The Judsons - 161 

The Long Reckonings .' 234 

The Millennial Day 277 

The New Year 3 

Three Noble Emotions fc . 231 

The Oblation • 50 

The Power Unseen 229 

The Poetry of Truth 209 

The Sabbath.' 87 

The Shepherd Boy •....• 47 

The Scientific Period 138 

The Supernatural 201 

The True Woman 78 

Transition , 49 

Types 1 159 

Two Characters 56 

Two Worlds. 64 

Various Lights 153 

Vision of Harvest 273 

Waiting . . 10 



